Somewhere More Familiar
by Collider
Summary: CC fic, set in the wake of "Justice". Lilly Rush and Kat Miller are kindred spirits; problem is, neither of them realise it. **On Hiatus**
1. Absolutely

_A/N: For this one, I owe an infinite debt of gratitude to oucellogal… for letting me bounce ideas off her, and also for throwing out countless awesome suggestions that helped transform what started out as a vague and convoluted idea into something that could actually be worked with. So yep, many many many many thanks, for listening to my inane rambling, and for all the invaluable advice._

_Also, just to clarify the setting a little bit. Technically, this fic is intended to take place during the end montage of the episode "Justice", at some random interval between the confession and the scene where Vera puts the box away and sees the victim. If you're not a stickler for detail, or can't remember the specifics, then setting it directly after the episode in its entirety works just as well._

--

…Somewhere More Familiar

**1.  
Absolutely**

* * *

Lilly Rush always did her best work at night.

It was a simple fact, like 'Nick Vera was a chauvinist jackass' or 'Will Jeffries had an unnatural obsession with country music'. There was no enigmatic logic behind it, it was simply the way things were. Thing was, she'd never noticed it, herself. People were always calling her on her workaholic tendencies, of course, and she would've been the first to admit that they'd been right… but she'd never associated her working habits with being a night owl. At least, not until recently, and she supposed it probably reflected badly on her skills as a detective that it had taken her this long to figure it out. But then, wasn't that always the way? She could spot the flaws in a complete stranger from a thousand miles away, but to see the same within herself was more than her inner vision would allow. She was just dedicated, she told herself, that was all. Dedicated to her work, to the victims she sought so hard to avenge. It didn't leave her much time to focus on her own habits.

The lie was convenient, and it was easy to convince herself that she'd always been that way. She'd always put her job ahead of her circadian rhythms, had always spent nights alone in the office until the sun crept through the shaded windows, finishing up paperwork and boxing up details. Difference was, it had never meant anything to her until now. It had just been who she was. Lilly Rush, insomniac workaholic. She'd been here because she'd wanted to be, because she'd found herself unable to sleep until a closed case was stamped and filed and boxed up and… well, _closed_. Wasn't enough to say it was closed, she had to see it with her own eyes. Only then could she take the photo off her bedside table and turn off the light.

It wasn't like that now. Suddenly, she wasn't here because she couldn't let herself rest until she saw the victim doing the same. She wasn't here because her mind wouldn't be quiet until that last piece of paperwork had been filed, with every 'T' crossed and every 'I' dotted. She was here because she needed something to do. Because she knew too well what was waiting for her at home, nightmares and sleeplessness, and she supposed old habits died hard. Even if she couldn't bring herself to grant this particular 'victim' his so-called peace, she was still a workaholic at heart… and, when sleeplessness came knocking at her door, she only knew of one truly effective way to deal with it. Her work was like a kind of medication; it soothed her, calmed her, made better all the little aches and pains and minute discomforts that filled her on a daily basis. It was a balm over her, and one she couldn't imagine having to live without. To know that, if she found herself unable to sleep, there would be nothing waiting for her here, in the sanctuary of the office? To walk in, restless and tired at who even knew what time, and find herself just as lost here as she was lying in bed and counting the seconds as they trickled past? No, she couldn't imagine that.

Besides, this particular case bothered her. She knew hers had been an unpopular opinion, that the rest of the team had been desperate to drop the damn thing as fast as possible, to let the doer slip through the cracks just because they were dealing with a victim who – yeah – deserved what he got. Oh, yeah, Lilly Rush would happily admit that they'd had a point, there. Tempers had been flaring high in the office long before they'd all made their bid to forget it, and she supposed she hadn't helped. Given the way things had turned out, maybe it would have been better to let the matter drop. Maybe. But she still had her doubts about that. It was always better to face the truth than to bury it, right? Even if the rules had to be bent sometimes.

Mike Delaney. 1982. Bastard had been on top of the world… and, boy, had he made sure every damn girl on campus knew it. Lilly felt her stomach churn in sympathetic anger, even as her shoulders tightened with the assurance that – in spite of that – she'd been right. They'd found the doer, hadn't they? The case had been laid to rest. And maybe Delaney's soul didn't deserve to be put to rest, but Jimmy Bartram's sure as hell did. Sometimes the guy whose name was on the box wasn't the true victim, and it was their job, as detectives – Homicide or otherwise – to make sure the victims saw justice served, however long they had to wait. It wasn't about Delaney; maybe the rest of the team had been unable to see that. But she had. She always saw things that the others didn't, she mused… but then, they all had their own specialist skills, and maybe this was hers. The ability to see beyond the justifiable homicide of a serial rapist, and see the people who had truly suffered. To grant peace to those victims, the ones who'd sat on their experiences for more than twenty-five years, and to let them finally start living. The hell with Mike Delaney and all he'd stood for. So what if his was the name on the box? He wasn't the one who had deserved justice and, for once, it seemed fitting that he was the one who hadn't lived to see it served.

It had been an uncomfortable case, for everyone involved and for the team as well, but Lilly felt vindicated by the knowledge that she'd been right all along in her pursuits to see it complete. It was their duty, no matter how old the case and no matter how dislikeable the victim. And now, restless as she was with insomnia and the promise of those damn nightmares if she tried to sleep, she'd take the opportunity to see it put to bed. To cross those 'T's and dot those 'I's and make sure every last piece of stray paperwork was filed away.

As she let her eyes adjust to the dim lighting of the office – barely noticeable in broad daylight, but quite painful on the eyes after the sun went down – she realised that, through all the infinite case-related thoughts that had been swirling unchecked through her brain, never once had the possibility crossed her mind that she might not be alone in her bout of insomniatic productivity. Lilly was a woman who prided herself on considering every possible outcome to every possible scenario, and yet she had to admit that she'd completely overlooked this one; the likelihood of such a thing was so infinitesimal that – if she _had_ considered it – she simply would've laughed at herself for indulging in paranoia. Nobody else on the team was dedicated enough, drive enough, or just plain crazy enough to come into the office at who-only-knew-what time of the night for the sake of putting to bed a case that could just as easily wait until morning. At least, that was what she'd assumed.

She stood there for some time, unnoticed, watching. It was another of the things she did well. Observing. Seeing. A good detective didn't need to hear an answer spoken aloud to know what it would be. A good detective could pluck an answer out of thin air, even before the question had been asked, and – ten minutes later, when all the words had been spoken – smile in satisfaction at the fact that they'd got it right. That was what a good detective did, and it made no difference whether she was in the witness room or a suspect's own living room. A good detective never stopped observing, even when off-duty. After all, you could never tell when you'd miss something important. So she stood there now, quiet and observant. Waiting for the perfect moment to ask that question aloud, waiting for the opportunity to hear the answer spoken, waiting for the release wherein she could smile with the knowledge that, yet again, she'd got it right. Observing, seeing… knowing when to make a move.

"Isn't it past your bedtime?"

Predictably, the question was followed by a startled yelp and the clatter of a pen hitting the floor (and, with it, a notebook and two-dozen loose sheets of paper), the noise reverberating loudly through the empty office; it was all Lilly could do to keep from laughing.

"Dammit, Lil!" For her part, Kat Miller sounded anything but amused. Clearly, she hadn't been expecting the need to share her late-night paperwork with anyone, either, and Lilly could practically see her struggle to get her pulse back under control as she glared furiously. "You tryin' to give me a heart attack!?"

Lilly allowed a brief chuckle to escape her lips, and shook her head. "Not intentionally," she offered, in as close an approximation to 'apologetic' as she ever got. "Just asked a simple question."

The glare didn't abate, but the fury behind Miller's eyes faded ever so slightly as she shrugged. "Could ask you the same one," she threw back, and dropped down to rescue the pen and miscellaneous paperwork she'd dropped in her surprise. Lilly made a point of not offering to help, instead falling back into her previous role of silent observer; this time, however, it was as much for her own self-preservation as it was a means of determining Miller's reasons for being here. The last thing she needed was the team's most unnervingly insightful cop to see behind the cracks in her own mask, not when she was the one whose place it was to come in here at night and do this sort of thing. They were on her territory now, dammit, and the focus was going to remain on Miller, at all costs. Lilly Rush, the first (albeit no longer the only) female murder cop in Philly, would make sure of it.

"C'mon, Miller," she said. "You're never in here after hours if you don't need to be." _I should know_, she thought. _I'm in here often enough myself_. Aloud, she waited for her prior words to settle, before continuing. "Won't Veronica be wondering where you are?"

Kat grunted as she pulled herself back up into her chair. "She's staying with my mom," she explained, and dropped the rescued paperwork unceremoniously back onto the desk, glancing up at Lilly with an expression of world-weary frustration. "Thanks, but I got it," she went on, sarcastic, as she set to work putting it back together into something vaguely resembling a legible order. "Really, it's fine. I got it. Don't gotta strain yourself rushin' to help or anything…"

"Sorry," Lilly offered, well aware of the fact that she sounded the exact opposite of sorry. "Didn't mean to scare you. I just wasn't expecting to have to fight for paperwork, at this time of night…"

Miller shrugged, but the tension in her posture loosened ever so slightly; clearly, she was taking on board what Lilly was saying, and thinking about it. "Don't even know what I'm doing here," she admitted. "Just… didn't wanna let this damn case sit out overnight."

Despite herself, Lilly grabbed the nearest chair, and sat herself down at the desk opposite Miller; she wasn't the sort to actively seek out closeness when she didn't need to, but she'd felt a flare of empathy and it was now beyond her power to fight it. "They get to you," she said, unassuming, "cases like this."

It was a statement, not a question, and Miller didn't even bother denying it. Lilly supposed it helped that she'd kept her words ambiguous, using a '_you'_ that could just as easily have been an '_us'_. There was comfort in knowing one wasn't alone in feeling overwhelmed by little things, and – though she'd deny it to her final breath – Lilly Rush knew that tragically well. And, yeah, it was obvious with the Delaney case; they'd all been affected by it, and it wasn't just because it was their first case without the boss standing by to hold their hands. Lilly supposed she was at part to blame for the others' discomfort, with her insistence that they keep pushing, but she refused to feel remorseful over that. Besides, she'd been there when Miller had lost her temper over Nick Vera's trademark insensitivity, and she'd known as well as anyone that the argument would have escalated to dangerous levels if Jeffries hadn't intervened. It wasn't like Miller to get so overwhelmed by rage over one of Vera's innumerable chauvinist moments, and it wasn't like Vera to get so damn hyper-defensive even after he'd realised he'd put his foot into his mouth… and that had happened long before Lilly had taken the case into her own hands. No, that hadn't been her fault. She hadn't helped the unease … but she sure as hell hadn't caused it, either. Delaney had done that, all by himself, nearly thirty years ago. If anyone was to be blamed for the backlash of his actions, it was him.

"They do," Miller agreed finally, after a few moments. "Guess they cut too close… whatever the hell Maggie Lafferty says about life back then being so damn different." She sighed, and the pen fell from between her fingers again; the look on her face suggested that – this time at least – the gesture was intentional, and Lilly countered the other woman's sigh with one of her own.

She expected, and had been expecting almost since Miller had caught her standing there, that she'd find herself faced with the Spanish Inquisition over why she'd been so damn enthusiastic to keep the case going. She'd dwelt on the subject enough, and she'd been ready to face it; truth be told, it would've been a far easier subject to broach than that of why she was here at this time of night (and she still had no intention of allowing that particular question to be asked), but it was a subject that Miller seemed to have no intention of broaching at all. Her silence, her refusal to ask any question at all, beyond her prior offhand remark that she could've just as easily have thrown Lilly's own question back at her, was unnatural, and Lilly caught herself frowning a bit.

"You shouldn't let Vera get to you…" she said. It was a dangerous statement, and she was conscious of the fact that she was stepping onto very thin ice long before Kat raised her eyes in a deadly warning. "I'm just saying," she back-pedalled cautiously. "He's a jackass, we all know that. He doesn't think before he opens his big mouth… but a big mouth is all he is. Just a lot of talk."

"You defending him?" Miller demanded, in a tone of voice that suggested she wasn't joking in the least. Lilly sighed tiredly, and shook her head, but she never got the chance to elaborate before Miller was off and running again. "He's almost as bad as Delaney," she went on, and Lilly blinked in surprise; Miller and Vera had called each other every rude name imaginable, but she'd never heard either of them compare the other to a criminal as heinous as Delaney; had it not been for the blinding flash of rage in Kat's eyes, Lilly would've interrupted right then and asked – as gently as possible – if she realised quite what she was implying. Clearly, though, Miller was perfectly aware of it, as she went on, anger never once abating. "You wanna defend him, go right ahead. But you tell me… _you tell me, Lil_… how in the hell you're gonna explain '_no means yes_' to any one of those victims."

"That wasn't what he meant…" Lilly said, flailing a little. It would help, she thought with a touch of irritation, if Vera just once stopped to think about what he was saying; she couldn't even use the argument that Miller had been the one who'd said '_no means yes_', because even she couldn't deny that Vera had implied it. And, no, he hadn't meant it. She knew that. Miller probably knew it, too. If she took five minutes to cool down and realise that she was talking about the guy whose foot practically lived in his own mouth, maybe she would've been a little gentler before leaping on him for yet another verbal screw-up. But Lilly had seen how angry she'd been at the time, and that was an anger that she knew too well wasn't about to abate swiftly, so she let her defence rest there for the time being. "You need any help on that paperwork?" she asked, changing tack as casually as she could, and throwing out a peace offering.

Kat blinked; clearly, she'd been so caught up in her tirade (heaven knew, when that girl got wrapped up in a subject she felt passionately about, there was simply no stopping her) that she'd forgotten why she'd been here in the dead of night at all. "All yours," she said, more than a little sulkily, shoving the scattered paperwork across the desk and refusing to meet Lilly's gaze. "Knock yourself out… I'm done with this crap."

In spite of the situation, in spite of the bitterness in the other woman's voice, Lilly couldn't help smiling. It was just like Kat Miller to take an innocuous (albeit admittedly ill-thought-out) comment, blow it out of proportion, and spend half an hour in the middle of the night ranting about it. Really, she supposed, she shouldn't have been wasting her time waiting on Miller to start interrogating her at all. Not when she had her own issues spinning around, just waiting for someone of like mind to off-lay them onto. Miller wasn't a feminist, Lilly knew. In fact, she was quite the opposite; when she'd admitted during the case of gender-confused Samantha Randall that she'd been a tomboy herself as a child, it had been all Lilly could do to keep from saying '_well, duh'_. Feminism wasn't something that had ever been on the cards for Kat, at least from what Lilly knew of her… but what she _was_ (and what, to some extent, though she would deny it if questioned, Lilly envied in her) was _proud_. Of her colour, of her daughter, of her double-X chromosomes. Of every tiny facet of what made her Kat Miller. That mattered to her. It mattered enough to fight for, to spend a half-hour ranting about in the middle of the night, to do anything that would allow her to keep hold of it, and may the Lord help anyone who dared try to challenge her. She was brutally passionate, to a fault, and that was a characteristic that Lilly saw in her all the time. Pride. The problem, and it was one that no amount of logic or rationality could ever make her see, was that there was such a thing as being _too_ proud… and, right now, glaring at the tabletop and muttering curses under her breath, Kat was close to that line.

"Go home," Lilly said quietly, in a voice she'd heard the boss use too many times to count. It wasn't an order, but it carried with it the suggestion that – if Kat knew what was good for her – she'd obey. "You're clearly exhausted, and you're not helping anyone by shooting your mouth off right now. Go to bed."

To her surprise – and possibly not hers alone – Miller burst out laughing. Lilly blinked, trying very hard to figure out whether this was a good sign, or simply a warning that Kat had lost any remaining shred of sanity she'd once had and was about to take her own life through creative use of a staple-gun. Frankly, she wasn't entirely sure whether she wanted to know, but the explanation was taken out of her capacity to seek it out, as Miller shook her head in sudden mirth and slapped the tabletop so hard that the resounding '_smack_' almost caused Lilly to jump out of her skin in unrestrained terror (of the kind that, again, she'd deny if questioned).

"Lemme get this straight…" Miller was saying, every other word punctuated with obnoxious emphasis. "_You're_ telling _me_ that _I've_ gotta get _my_ ass to bed… 'cause _I'm_ clearly exhausted?" She let the question hang on the air for a moment, while she got another explosive laugh out of her system, during which time Lilly struggled to figure out what was so damn funny. Eventually, and just as Lilly was about to take the woman by the shoulders and shake her until she either calmed down or explained herself, she found the self-control to continue. "You looked in a mirror lately, Lil? 'Cause… you tellin' _anyone_ they need to get more sleep is like—" she trailed off for a second, apparently hunting a suitable analogy. "—like Vera tellin' Valens he needs to go on a diet."

It may not have been a suitable analogy – at least not by Lilly's perception of herself – but it had the dual effect of leaving her reeling with laughter of her own, and causing her to bristle with offence at the implication. "I don't need to get more sleep," she said, hyper-defensive, her barriers going up almost so fast and so sharp that she could feel them doing so. There was no way that Miller wouldn't recognise the lie in what she was saying, but it was in her very nature to make the assertion anyway, to push that image of being fine and perfect and everything that was Lilly Rush, whether it would be believed or not. She could no more keep the lie from falling off her lips than she could've surrendered to sleep that night in the first place. "I get plenty of sleep."

"_Sure_ you do," Miller shot back, not missing a beat, and now she did meet Lilly's gaze. There was a glint of mischief in her eyes, drowned almost within the darkness, but there was no mistaking it, and Lilly couldn't deny being more than a little afraid. Almost more even than when she got caught on a tangent of principle, Kat was nothing short of terrifying when she was on a mission of mischief. "You still seeing the shrink?"

The question came out of left field, and Lilly felt her breath catch in surprise. Her reflex reaction was to warn Miller that the subject was none of her damn business, but there had been no malice in the words. There had been nothing in them at all, in fact, but curiosity and faint trace of empathy (carefully concealed, of course… because, if there was one thing everyone knew about Lilly Rush, it was that showing empathy was a sure-fire way to get one's head bitten off). Strange thing was, with the question out in the air now, it seemed almost anti-climactic. Lilly had been waiting for the subject of her own sleeplessness to be raised, had been preparing herself to shoot down any accusations even before they were fired, but Miller had dodged the subject – or made a show of dodging the subject – while simultaneously, somehow, remaining fixed neatly on it without having to actively raise it. If she knew about the sleepless nights, she'd know about the cause of them – or, at least, she'd think she did – and, by broaching the subject of the shrink, she was presenting a buffer for the real issue. It was cruelly clever, but at the same time quite dangerously devious. Lilly didn't know whether to admire Miller or to hate her.

"No," she said, pointedly, and now it was her turn to glare at the tabletop. "Last session was a couple of months ago. Didn't see any point in sticking around after that."

That was mostly true, if not entirely so. Telling her deepest secrets wasn't something that had ever come easily to her, and she didn't know why in the hell people assumed it would be easier to tell them to a total stranger than someone she actually trusted (not that there were very many of _those_ running around, either, but that wasn't the point). It would never have worked out, not for herself or for the shrink, whose frustration had been painfully obvious in those final few sessions. No, it was better this way. Scotty had once said, all cops he knew were lone wolves, and she was the finest example of that either of them knew. She dealt with her problems herself, or she didn't deal with them at all. And, even if it _did _turn out to be more the latter case than the former, well, at least she wasn't involving anyone else in her personal business. What the hell right did some stranger with a 'certificate' have, telling her what she should and shouldn't feel? What the hell right did Miller have, now, asking her about it, looking at her in that way, as if to imply that she should've stuck with it?

"Didn't see the point, huh?" Miller repeated, and Lilly had to fight the temptation to slap her. She nodded, though she knew it was a rhetorical question. "That's BS, and we both know it," the other woman went on. "You just can't stand the thought of actually opening up to someone, can you?"

Lilly choked in indignation. "Right," she growled. "'Cause _you're_ an open book."

Miller smirked; clearly, she'd been expecting that. "Least I was smart enough to keep seein' the damn shrink as long as I needed, and the hell with what other people thought," she retorted.

Stunned into silence, Lilly almost choked at the directness of the comment. She'd never heard Kat talk about her own shooting before, though she knew Jeffries had raised the subject once; hearing her talk about it now, as if it was something as mundane as reading the morning paper, struck Lilly as the most unpleasant kind of shock, and she flinched for just a single moment. It hadn't been the same, she knew, but to hear even a vaguely similar scenario raised so candidly was the furthest thing from helpful she could have imagined.

Thankfully, her self-discipline came flooding back a few seconds later, and she rolled her eyes. "Least I don't stay up all night filling out paperwork just 'cause I'm mad at Nick Vera for making a comment he didn't even realise he was making," she retaliated. Miller's face darkened at that, and Lilly could sense another oncoming tirade, so cut it off before it started with a wave of her hand. "Save it, okay? I don't care why it bothers you so much. Doesn't matter to me. It matters to _you_. Your issue, not mine. I don't pretend to understand it—"

Miller sighed. "—And you don't want me to pretend I understand yours." She sighed again, somewhere between angry and resigned. "But I _do_ understand it, Lil. Been there, done that." A sad smile crossed her lips, but only for a moment, and Lilly felt her barriers falter momentarily. "You're not alone in this."

_Yeah, I am_. The thought came as reflexively as breathing, and it was more than Lilly was capable of to ignore it. The problem was, Miller _didn't_ understand. She understood as much of the situation as she wanted to, just as everyone else did. Granted, the tiny fraction that she did understand, she understood far better than any of the boys – except, ironically, the boss – but it was still just that, a tiny fraction of something infinitely deeper and more complex. Lilly Rush wasn't a simple person at the best of times, but she'd been through more over the course of a single case than even the most complicated cops went through over the course of a lifetime. No way in hell could Kat understand that, for all her inherent insight. And why should she? Lilly Rush had been shot. Lilly Rush had nearly died. Nearly, but not quite. Surely that was the important part. Why would anyone waste their time wondering about all the tiny little _other_ things, when that was clearly the bit that mattered? She laughed, a touch harshly, not realising that the sound had been made aloud until she caught the puzzled frown on Miller's face.

Problem was, it wasn't the full story. It was the part of the story everyone would remember, while the rest went forgotten and unnoticed… and, as with so many stories that got twisted and distorted and broken over the course of time, those forgotten moments were the ones that cut the deepest. Just as Miller no doubt had her own intimate and deeply-buried reasons for reacting so violently to Vera's chauvinistic ignorance on this one occasion, Lilly too had her own dark secrets, her own issues to deal with, and they were issues that nobody on the team could understand, however desperately they clung to the self-involved delusions that they could.

Cops got shot all the time. Kat Miller knew it. John Stillman knew it. Lilly Rush knew it. She'd been in the game long enough to know how it worked, and she'd seen it happen enough times to know what to expect. There was nothing new in it, nothing to shock her or startle her, or do anything more than cause her to feel a few weeks' worth of real uncomfortable pain. She'd gotten over it. That part was true… and maybe the shrink had helped, though Lilly frankly couldn't see how. It had taken a while, probably longer than it should have, and she had her suspicions that the boss had seen that in those first few weeks. Offering up the Assigned position to Scotty instead of herself had been the first clue, but there had been many. And, looking back now, he'd been right. She hadn't been ready, she'd come back too soon because she'd always been at her best when she was kept busy with work, and she'd convinced herself that no tragedy would ever be enough to suck out her love and dedication to her job. And, with time and by process of throwing herself back into that job, she'd come to terms with that side of what she'd endured. Yes, her nightmares had stopped being about the gunshot ages ago. Long before now.

'_Is there anyone we can call?'_

That was the heart of it. The heart of the nightmares, the heart of her trauma, and the heart of the haunted, cold look that she had no doubt was tracing enigmatic patterns across her face right now. Murder Cops faced death every single day of their lives. Anyone not comfortable with their own mortality had no right being in Homicide, Lilly had learned that the hard way the day she'd faced down George Marks; he'd caught her by surprise, and she'd been traumatised. She should've been better prepared than she was, but he'd gotten under her skin. He'd known her, known her too well, and it had thrown her so much further than she should ever have allowed it to. It had been a wake-up call, of the worst possible kind, but also the best. She'd needed it, had needed to know beyond all doubt that she was able to deal with her own mortality as well as that of the victims she avenged. She'd come out of it scarred but safe. And she'd been content. If the incident with Ed Marteson had taken place at any other time, any other week, any other moment… right now, she would have been fine. She would have been better than fine. She would've picked herself up and put the moment behind her. It was a learning experience, and one she would – over the course of time – have come to be grateful for the opportunity to live through.

But not like this. It shouldn't have happened like this. Not when she was feeling so shattered, so fragile… so _mortal_, already. Not when she'd already looked into the cold dead eyes of her own mother – the woman who, though she'd never been there, had always been _there_ – and seen death in a way that she truly had never seen it before. She dealt with it every day, like they all did… but she'd never seen it like that before.

No way in hell could the others on the team claim to understand _that_. Not without having lived through it. And she wanted to appreciate their comfort, wanted to look at Kat Miller right now and believe her when she said she could understand, that Lilly wasn't alone. But it wasn't true. There was faith in Miller's eyes, though, deep-set and honest and genuine. She believed, truly believed with every fibre of her being, that she understood. That it was all about the bullets. Lilly watched her, studied her face, that faith dancing through her eyes like tiny fireflies, and she just couldn't bring herself to break the other woman's heart by admitting the truth. It was just another in the countless ways that Miller was wrong tonight. Lilly wasn't afraid of opening up, not right not. Oh, she didn't want to. Oh, if she could, she probably still wouldn't… but that wasn't what kept her from doing so right at that moment. Miller was a good cop, and a good person. Lilly Rush couldn't be the one to break her heart by telling her she'd got it wrong. She couldn't be the one to chase away those fireflies in her eyes. After all, who wanted their delusions of grandeur to be shattered by something so unimportant as the truth? The truth just got in the way.

"You're right," she said, quietly, and watched sadly as Miller's face lit up with pure joy at being the person who had brought about such a rare and precious confession. Did it really matter that it had been a false one? Did it matter that Jimmy Bartram's confession had been false? Justice had been served… right?

"Y'know what I think?" Miller asked, and Lilly shrugged in the closest approximation to actual curiosity as she could muster while really just wishing the other woman would leave her alone with her precious paperwork. "I think this damn Delaney case is messing with our heads. I think… emotions are runnin' high anyway, what with the boss being outta commission… and this damn bastard case just made everything worse." There was venom in her voice then, and Lilly rolled her eyes; if Kat let herself slip into another damn rant about Vera's insensitivity, then Lilly would quite seriously consider jumping right out of the goddamned window. "It's got us all depressed," the other woman went on, rather thankfully lacking in venom this time. "And you know the best cure for depression?"

Lilly grimaced. "Does it involve donuts?"

"No…" Kat said, sounding vaguely puzzled. "But thanks for makin' me hungry when there ain't a bakery open for a thousand miles." She shook her head, dismissing the issue as one of unimportance – at least for the time being – and returned to her apparent task. "We need a girls' night out. We need to go someplace loud, someplace with lots of booze… and we need to get drunk."

Lilly stared at her for a handful of extremely long seconds. "No," she said, when she'd finally found her voice again. "Maybe _you_ need to get drunk… but you sure as hell are not taking me with you."

"Yeah, I am," Miller retorted, with the self-satisfaction of someone who considered the discussion over; it was the same near-arrogance that Lilly often saw Scotty and Nick turn on suspects in the witness room, and she made a mental note to put in a plea with Jeffries to keep Miller from fraternising with the boys from now on. Clearly, it bred bad habits. "I am," she repeated. "You know why?"

Impatient, Lilly rose to the bait. "This should be good," she deadpanned. "Why?"

"'Cause I understand you," Miller replied, and Lilly grimaced again; if Miller was planning on using that line as a ticket to bribery, Lilly would make no hesitation in rescinding her fabrication. It would be worth seeing the light of optimism go out behind her eyes if it meant not having to deal with hearing that damn sentence spoken aloud every time she wanted something. No, that was something Lilly Rush had no intention of dealing with, and she'd already opened her mouth to correct that assertion, when Kat continued. "I understand you," she repeated. "And you understand me."

Lilly blinked that at. Understanding victims, understanding criminals, understanding all the subtle nuances that made up a murder investigation… that, she was an expert at. But understanding her colleagues, understanding the inner workings of the people she sat beside and talked to and worked with every day? That was beyond her realm of comprehension, and she made no effort to hide the confusion and disbelief that she felt swimming across her face at the statement. "I think you're putting too much faith in me," she offered, simply.

"No, I'm not," Miller replied, that damn unshakeable smugness firmly in place; Lilly was beginning to hate it. "You know what it's like to be me… mostly because I never stop complainin'." She grinned, a little sheepishly, and Lilly felt a small chuckle bubbling up inside her; at least Miller was honest in that respect. "You know damn well how long it's been since I got a night off without havin' to worry about Veronica, 'cause you've been right there for the past three months of First Thursdays." Lilly watched with a wry smile as Miller's fingers twitched reflexively, resting on her cellphone for just a moment. "And you know as well as I do that there ain't much scope for a girls' night out round here, workin' with the testosterone-fuelled jackass brigade we got in this dump."

Rolling her eyes, Lilly busied herself with the paperwork. "It's not gonna work, Miller," she said coolly. "You might as well give up now. I'm going to finish writing up this case, and then I'm going to go home."

"No you're not," Miller observed. "You'll find some other case to write up or report to file or whatever, and then it'll be morning and you'll be running on empty. And, hell, if you're gonna be runnin' on empty anyway, might as well be doing it in the aftermath to a kickass night of cutting loose, right?" She didn't wait on an answer, even as Lilly felt herself sigh heavily with irritation. "Besides… I ain't going home either. So you either dump this goddamn paperwork on Vera's desk and let _him_ finish writin' up his buddy Delaney's case while we go out and get soused… or I sit right here and spend the whole night explaining in intimate detail exactly why he's such a loudmouthed obnoxious jackass who needs a swift kick in the privates. Your choice."

Lilly allowed her head to drop forward until it connected solidly with the desk. The contact was mildly painful, but substantially less so than either of the two options she was now facing, and she allowed herself to draw comfort from it. "Just curious…" she heard herself murmuring, the words muffled and indistinct against the cool wood of the tabletop. "That mouth of yours _is_ registered as a lethal weapon, right…?"

She didn't even need to raise her head to see the grin spreading even wider across Miller's face. "Shut up and get your coat."

* * *

**TBC**


	2. Lift

_A/N: As per usual, thanks to everyone who's taken the time to review this and all of my other stuff. It's very, very much appreciated. And, once again, many thanks to oucellogal for inspiring – both directly and vicariously – a fair few of the ideas used in this chapter. You rock!  
_

--

**2.  
Lift**

* * *

It wasn't until she was halfway through her third Mai-Tai that Kat Miller realised just how long it had been since she had allowed herself to get completely drunk. She made a point, usually, of keeping herself relatively restrained on First Thursdays, if not for the sake of her dignity then for that of her daughter. It wasn't common, by any stretch of the imagination, that Veronica would be in a position – on a week-night, no less – whereby Kat simply didn't have to worry. The rules, on that score, were pretty simple: Dina had responsibility during the day, and the babysitter took over at night. It had been a sensible option for everyone involved; Kat had been adamant that her decision to have a child and a career at the same time not impact on her mother any more than was utterly necessary, as loudly as Dina had protested that issue, and Veronica – in the true style of a young girl – adored the morally ambiguous young woman who let her stay up an hour past her bedtime when her mother had to work late. The vast majority of the time, it worked perfectly… and, if the only drawback was that Kat would have to show a little self-control when she went out drinking with her work colleagues, then so be it.

She had no idea what had inspired Dina to insist on taking Veronica for the night on this particular occasion; it wasn't a common practise, and Kat hadn't really had any intention of working late. Maybe her mother had heard the edge in her voice when she'd called earlier in the afternoon to let her know that Veronica had returned safely from school; it certainly wasn't something Kat would put past her. Dina was terrifyingly perceptive at times, something that Kat had loathed in her childhood; how in the hell was a kid supposed to get away with mischief if her mother called her on it before she even had a chance to think up a convincing lie? So it was certainly feasible that she'd simply picked up on the chaotic thoughts that had undeniably been flowing through Kat's brain throughout the conversation, and had figured she was in need of a quiet night alone. A small, derisive laugh escaped her lips unbidden at that thought; she was pretty damn sure she knew exactly what her mother would have to say if she found out precisely how Kat was spending her so-called 'quiet night'.

Across the table (if the tiny block of surface between them could be classed as a 'table'), Lilly was staring at her, the beginnings of a puzzled frown slowly creeping across her face. "Something funny?" she asked, and Kat felt the heat of embarrassment touch her face. If she was laughing aloud at her inner thoughts, and she was only two and a half Mai-Tais into the evening, she didn't stand a chance of keeping herself outside the boundaries of total humiliation by the end of the night. Ah well, she thought, as she shrugged in response to the question. At least it would give Lilly – who, even now, looked like she would sooner be anywhere but there right at that moment – something to amuse herself with, in the absence of any actual entertainment.

"Just picturin' the look on my mom's face," she explained, finally. "She doesn't really approve of…" For a moment, she let the sentence trail off, considering the next part carefully – or, as carefully as anything could be considered after two and a half Mai-Tais – before continuing, "…anything. At all." A wry grin replaced the embarrassment on her face. "If I'm in the office at two in the morning, I work too hard. If I'm drinking in a bar someplace, I'm a party girl and I really oughtta know better."

She would have been perfectly content to continue in this vein, but something in the back of her mind told her to drop the subject there. She blinked in confusion at the instinct, and frowned thoughtfully. It was only when she let her eyes relax enough to re-focus on Lilly that she realised where the thought had come from. There was a sort of subdued sorrow in the blonde's face, a look that said she was amused and saddened at the same time, and that the combination of two such diametrically opposed emotions were driving her almost to the point of insanity. Kat felt her frown deepening slightly, and the hand that wasn't occupied with the Mai-Tai reflexively moved to cross the table in combined sympathy and concern. Her tongue flexed, struggling to shape the words '_you okay?'_, but something inside her – the same something that had kept her from continuing her prior tirade – restrained her, tightening the muscles in her throat until she couldn't say anything. It was always dangerous, she knew, to ask Lilly Rush anything that could (ever, in any way) be construed as 'personal', and she'd kept a close enough eye on what the blonde was drinking to know that she was nowhere near a suitable level of inebriation to allow that sort of question to slide by without raising the Red Alert signal and sending those damn patented Lilly Rush Protective Barriers up faster than Kat would ever be able to stop them.

She didn't know very much about Lilly's relationship with her mother, only that it had been tumultuous at best; she had seldom spoken of the woman at all and, on the rare occasion that she had, it was always in a voice filled with disdain and something dangerously close to malice. Kat would never have suspected, in a million years, that the wound from that particular injury would still be fresh… not in the midst of everything else that Lilly had been dealing with at the time… and, as she took another long swallow of the Mai-Tai, she couldn't help but marvel at her own lack of foresight. Of everyone in Homicide, she probably knew the least about Lilly Rush; hell, she probably knew the least about _everyone_, simply off the back of still being the resident newbie. Oh, she'd carved out a niche for herself there, and they'd all been welcoming and accepting of her place among them… but it wasn't the same. She was one of them, she knew; she'd earned the right to see herself in that way, but hadn't earned the right to call herself by the name. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

Really, then, it was only fair that Lilly be so guarded against her. Even if they were two of a kind, the only two gals in a field full of boys, it had always been Lilly's field. Kat was still a visitor, pretty much, and she couldn't really blame Lil for expecting that – any day now – she'd up and disappear back to the hellhole that was Narcotics. It wasn't gonna happen, and Kat suddenly found herself almost overwhelmed by the desire to reach across the table and _say_ that, to throw that reassurance out there: Lilly wasn't the only girl on the team anymore. In that way – and in a million others – she wasn't alone. She didn't have to be alone, not in anything. She could let her hair down and laugh and talk about her mother if she wanted to, and just _be Lilly Rush_ without having to answer to anyone or anything, and Kat Miller sure as hell wouldn't cast any judgement 'cause she knew those feelings all too well herself. But she wasn't there yet. There wasn't enough between them, beyond a couple of similar experiences and a shared use of the ladies' bathrooms. Oh, she wanted there to be. She was a girl, she'd always been a girl and – even if she was a boyish kind of girl – she _liked_ being a girl. It wasn't fair, she couldn't help thinking, that the only other woman in the whole damn office had completely forgotten what it meant to be one.

Lilly Rush was distanced at the best of times, even from those people she trusted. Kat could understand that. It had to be difficult – hell, probably near impossible – being the only female detective in Homicide; it was hard enough being one of two, especially when the other one was a closed-off blonde who needed to be blackmailed into coming out on one lousy girls' night… but to be the only one? She couldn't even imagine the balls Rush must've needed to survive in that ocean of testosterone, completely alone. So maybe she couldn't blame the other woman for being a little suppressed and closed-off. If you worked with boys for your entire career, it was pretty much inevitable that you'd start thinking like one, too. Kat wasn't there, yet, though Vera was trying his hardest to break her… and maybe that too had lent a hand in firing her temper when he'd made his ignorant comments on the subject of Delaney. As if they were in any way justified. Shrugging and shaking his head, as if they'd been discussing pizza toppings and not one of the most traumatic experiences anyone could live through. The mere thought of it, of his blasé attitude as he made his so-called 'point' was enough to tighten her fingers into a half-fist around the cool glass, and she knocked back the remainder of the drink without so much as a grimace. Nine times out of ten, she adored Nick Vera. She'd never admit it to him in a million years, but he made her laugh and gave her something to stand up to, and heaven knew she needed that in a job as depressing as hers. But sometimes – not often, barely occasionally – in moments like this, when he crossed that line, she hated him with all her heart.

"Need another drink," she muttered, hearing her voice slur. Three drinks in, and she was already slurring; this didn't bode well for her endurance, but she'd be damned if she'd let Lilly get out of this and go home early on a technicality like that. Besides, her descent into drunkenness seemed to be having the right effect on the blonde; in spite of herself and her reluctance at being here, Lilly was smirking just a little at the vocal wobble. Thankfully, she didn't say anything… partly, Kat imagined, because she couldn't think of anything appropriate to say, but mostly – she had no doubt – because she stole the moment before Lilly had the chance to catch her breath, and slapped a twenty-dollar bill in her hand. "Go get me another." It was an order (sort of) but a light-hearted one, punctuated by a scowl at the sight of the still-full margarita that sat in front of the blonde. "And get you another, too… you ain't drinkin' enough."

"I think I'm a better judge of that than you," Lilly pointed out, kindly but with deadly seriousness, and Kat crossed her arms with immature sulkiness, in what she realised was exactly the same way Veronica did after being instructed to go to bed early. "I mean it," Lilly reiterated. "I'm here. Don't push it."

Kat rolled her eyes as Lilly retreated from the table, and traced the rim of her empty glass with her fingertips as she felt the alcohol beginning to buzz through her head. This was what she needed, what they both needed. Get the damn ghosts – hers, of Nick Vera and Mike Delaney; Lilly's, of Ed Marteson and her mother – out of their minds, and replace them with that quiet electric hum borne of too many cocktails and too much loud music. Problem was, there was still that aura of stubborn defiance wrapped around Lilly Rush; she hadn't wanted to be here at all, and she fully intended to take every opportunity presented to remind Kat of that fact. Even if it turned out to be the best idea either of them had ever had, there was no way in hell Lilly would admit to it, and – even if, through some miracle, the damn woman was able to cut loose and enjoy herself – there was no doubt in Kat's mind that it would be with a sober scowl fixed firmly in place.

It wasn't fair, she thought moodily. Of all the female cops in Philly (and, okay, maybe there wasn't a great selection, there, but that wasn't the point), why in the hell did she have to get stuck working alongside the only one who'd had their sense of fun surgically removed at birth? It was one of the – very few – things she deeply missed about giving up her position in Narcotics in favour of Homicide; through all the twisted crap they had to deal with on a firsthand bases, at least Narc cops knew how to have a good time. And, okay, so maybe Homicide could do that too, but those moments were fewer and further between than they'd ever been in Narc.

Or maybe it was her. Maybe she'd grown up a little since joining Homicide, too. She still had her undercover buddies, still hung out with them occasionally, but something had changed when she'd made the transition to Homicide. With the dress code and the dead bodies had come a strange sense of morbidity, and it had been something she hadn't expected. Maybe it was the nature of what she was doing now, the stark contrast between dealing with no-hopers who were smoking and shooting up and snorting crap that would no doubt kill them within a few years, and dealing with folks from every possible walk of life who'd already been dead that long. It was like taking a step forward in time, sometimes, seeing the cold and empty future of the dealers and junkies that she'd busted more times than she could count, and of countless other people besides. It _was_ a sobering concept, there was no denying it, and there was no denying that – every now and then – they did stumble across a case that cut so deep it was all she could do to keep from lapsing into a state of depression herself.

In that respect, the Delaney case had been the closest she'd come in a long time. It hadn't been personal, but it had felt that way. Interviewing the victim's victims, one after the other, had been one of the most heartbreaking and painful tasks she'd ever had to undertake, in either Homicide or Narc, and there had been times she'd almost felt her heart shatter under the weight of it. To listen as they poured out their very souls, their darkest experience, and then to ask – no, _demand_ – that they offer up alibis or risk getting arrested? It had made her sick to her stomach, and all the while Vera's voice had been resounding in her head, chanting '_no means yes_' in that obnoxiously ignorant tone of voice he was so good at adopting. Yeah… dealing with situations like that had to be enough to drive anyone insane, or at least damn close to it, and – if that was what they dealt with every day of their lives, if every one of their cases were as traumatic as that – she supposed she'd have no place criticising Lilly for her stoicism. But they weren't. The Delaney case was, thankfully, a rare twisted moment in a job that – while it was never flowers and kittens – at least had its light moments, provided a girl could shake up her sense of humour.

But, even in those light-hearted moments, Lilly had fixed firm in her stoicism… and that was what frustrated Kat more than anything. She'd seen flashes of brightness, ripples of rainbows in muddy water, spots of colour against a dark grey canvas… momentary glimpses into the heart of Lilly Rush, tiny things that made her smile or laugh. But they were so fleeting, so few and far between, that damn mask of emotionless indifference was always right back in place before Kat was ever able to get a fix on what had caused the brief joy in the first place. And she wanted to. She wanted to see those bright moments, those dazzling ripples, because Lilly was a completely different person when she smiled. It was as if all the ice that she'd built up around her, carved her barriers out of, trusted to keep her frozen and solid and safe from the rest of the world… it was as if they melted away, leaving bare the soul of what Kat knew was – deep inside – a truly remarkable human being. If only she could trust herself to be that person, to let the frost thaw around her just a tiny little bit. It was frustrating, maddening, and Kat felt her shoulders square with resolve. If she had to drink every damn Mai-Tai in Philadelphia, she'd get Lilly Rush to smile. She'd get her to cast aside her frozen shroud, just for a moment, and be that person… that wonderful, glowing person that they all knew was there, but that was so rarely seen they couldn't help wondering whether it was a figment of their collective imaginations.

She could understand Lilly closing herself off among the boys. Half the time, they were mindless jackasses fuelled by their love for sports, sex, and stupidity… and, the other half, they were so damn busy working the cases, they didn't have time to bring out much of anything in anyone. But Lilly wasn't on the boy's turf, now, and there was no way in hell she was gonna use their insensitivity or their chauvinism or their general maleness as an excuse to keep from cutting loose and damn well enjoying herself, female-style. Not now. She was on Kat Miller's turf now, and Kat Miller didn't take any goddamn excuses from anyone, least of all Lilly Rush.

As if on cue, Lilly picked that moment to return, placing another Mai-Tai down on the table as unceremoniously as she could manage while evidently trying real hard not to spill it. "Go slow with this one," she said, and her eyes raked cynically over Kat as she planted herself back in her seat; Kat, of course, returned the examination with a pointed scowl. "I mean it," Lilly snapped, impatiently. "If you think I'm carrying you home in the middle of the night, you're crazy."

Kat grinned at that, the scowl dropping from her face as if it had been forcibly removed. So, maybe hope wasn't lost on finding a sense of humour for Lilly Rush tonight, after all. "You couldn't, even if you wanted to," she pointed out, smirking. "Can't even pick up the damn case boxes, most of the time." Lilly choked indignantly, and Kat covered her laughter by making a start on the new drink. "Nothin' personal," she went on, when she'd swallowed. "We all got our flaws. Nobody's fault that yours is a complete lack of upper body strength."

Now it was Lilly's turn to glare. "Alcohol makes you mean," she observed, tilting her head in the general direction of the drink. "You don't start behaving, I'll have to take that away from you…"

"You don't wanna do that," Kat threw back. "Trust me. You're better advised just gettin' stuck into your own damn drink. You get humiliated both ways… but, if your ass is drunk too, at least you'll be givin' as good as you're getting." She raised a single eyebrow, just to emphasise the point, and took another healthy sip of the Mai-Tai. "You gotta live a little, Rush."

Lilly muttered something unpleasant under her breath, and regarded her own untouched margarita with a low sigh and an expression that said she had no intention of drinking it. Kat, for her part, mirrored the frustrated exhalation with one of her own, and rolled her eyes. Trying to get anything out of Lilly Rush was like trying to get blood out of a stone, and it was a damn miracle she'd even got her to come out at all; Kat supposed she should've been thankful for the little victories, and just accept the companionship without pushing for any actual inebriation on Lilly's part… but she sure as hell hadn't got where she was by doing things in half-measures, and that wasn't a habit she planned to start getting into now. Lilly was a tough case to crack, there was no denying; but Kat was a great detective and a great cop, and she had absolute faith in herself to get the job done.

They sat in there silence for a handful of minutes, Lilly glaring at the margarita as if it alone was the source of all the world's unhappiness, and Kat studying her as if she could unravel the tangled knot that was Lilly Rush just by willing it to be so. She wanted to ask, to demand to know why Lilly was so determined to ruin this, when they both knew it stood every chance of being just what they both needed, but she knew perfectly well that such a question would be met with resistance – even anger, if Lil was feeling particularly uncharitable. No, she needed another approach, and she let her fingers tap thoughtfully against the cold wet glass still holding her drink. The motion, unintentional and idle as it had been, drummed out a rhythm… a pulse, which started at the very edges of her nails where they contacted with the glass and tickled upwards through her arms until it struck the very middle of her brain with all the force of a hurricane. Slowly, a grin began to cross her face, and she ceased tapping for just long enough to drain the glass dry in a single unladylike gulp, before returning it to the table.

"You brought this on yourself, Lil," she said, pointedly, her vision blurring for just a moment as her body reacted to the half-glass of alcohol she'd just forced down it.

"Brought what—" Lilly began, sounding concerned, but the question trailed off from her lips before she'd even fully formed it, as the realisation of what she was about to witness hit home, rendering her speechless and uncomfortable and simply terrified. As she had every right to be, Kat mused as the grin on her face took on a vicious edge, even as Lilly looked at her with desperate eyes. "Don't. _Don't you dare_. I swear, Miller, if you even _think_ of doing what I think you're thinking of doing… it's over. This night is over. We're done."

Kat shook her head. "Lilly, Lilly, Lilly," she said, a faint hint of melodramatic sadness just inching into her voice. "You know what your problem is? You gotta lighten up."

"I mean it…" Lilly was still insisting, all her infamous self-control shot completely to hell as the words sounded, not like an order or a demand, but like a helpless plea.

"Start by admitting—" Kat started up, sliding the glass across the table to the other woman, in favour of using the surface of the wood itself to beat out her rhythm, "—from cradle to tomb isn't that long a stay." At that, Lilly let out a groan so loud that Kat half-expected the bartender to come over and make sure everything was all right; when he didn't, she gave up entirely any feint she'd been making to keep her tone conversational, and felt her voice rising into lyrical song, the words coming from deep within her now, unmistakeable. "Life is a cabaret, old chum—"

She stopped there and grinned, fixing Lilly with a look that said, with absolutely no margin for misinterpretation, '_if you don't give me the next line, I'm gonna sing it so damn loud they'll hear me in California'_. For her part, looking like she desperately wanted to burst into tears, Lilly dropped her head into her hands in a gesture of complete and utter surrender.

"—come to the cabaret," she finished, humiliated.

The glee bubbled up inside Kat faster than she could hold it under control, and – if she'd gone that little bit slower on the damn Mai-Tai, like Lilly had told her to – maybe she would've been able to stop the giggle that erupted from her; as it was, there was nothing she could do but watch herself from a dissociated (and mildly horrified) distance as the sound shuddered from her lips. Not a laugh. Not a chuckle. Not even an explosive hysterical guffaw. No. A giggle. A goddamn girlish _giggle_.

Lilly's head snapped back up faster than Kat had ever seen her move since joining the Homicide team, and suddenly the blonde was staring at her; _staring_ at her, mouth open and eyes so wide they looked like dinner plates in a too-pale face, _staring_ as if Kat had just grown an extra head right in front of her, or started yelling obscenities in Pig Latin. "Uh, Miller…" Lilly said, enunciating carefully, "…did you just… _giggle_?"

And now it was Kat's turn to hold her head in her hands and desperately wish she could burst into tears from the sheer outright humiliation. "No…" she replied, in a voice that was very tiny.

"You _did_," Lilly insisted, suddenly more animated than Kat had seen her in months. Her hands snaked out in front of her, pointing an accusing finger at her companion with one, while the other dropped onto the table and waved the empty Mai-Tai glass like some kind of weapon. "You _giggled_. The great Kat Miller. The biggest badass to ever come out of Narcotics… and she's giggling like a little girl."

Kat glared.

Or tried to.

She wanted to glare. If ever there was a situation worthy of a glare, this was it. If ever there was a scenario that needed her to call upon the greatest power at her disposal, it was this one. But, somewhere between the instruction being issued from her brain, and the muscles in her face actually obeying that instruction, something went rather horribly wrong, and she suddenly found herself pouting. Pouting… _like a little girl_. Again. And she knew, even before she trusted herself to fix her gaze on Lilly's again, that this would only made the situation a thousand times worse, but all the knowledge in the world wouldn't wipe the expression from her face.

Lilly coughed, pretentiously. "You're…" she started, then stopped, apparently thinking it better to refrain from saying anything at that point, than further aiding the death of Kat Miller's reputation.

"What?" Kat demanded, moodily, in a voice that said '_there ain't no way this is gonna get any worse, so you might as well just say it and put us both outta our misery'_.

Lilly smiled. It wasn't much of a smile, could barely be described as a smile at all, but it was there, and it brought with it a promise of – if not happiness – at the very least something that could almost be described (with a little imagination) as positivity. It was one of the most wonderful things Kat Miller had seen in her life and – even as she braced herself for whatever insult was about to leave the other woman's mouth – she couldn't help taking just the briefest of moments to bask in the warmth of that emotional shift. Even if nothing more came of this evening than this, even if she never got a _real_ smile… she'd have that shadow of optimism.

"You're…" Lilly repeated, and her gaze dropped down to focus on the table, as if she was afraid that Kat would try and punch her out if she made eye-contact for even a second. "You're a weird kind of adorable when you're drunk."

For a long time, Kat could do nothing but try very hard to keep herself from choking in combined shock and outrage. She'd been called a _lot_ of things when drunk before – more than a few of which had resulted in her drinking partner suffering a black eye or two – but '_adorable'_ had never even featured in her wildest imaginings. She didn't know what to say. Here she was, a woman who prided herself on being cocky and – like Lilly had said – badass… and here was some skinny blonde sitting opposite her, stone cold sober, with the gall to call her '_adorable'_. Something was seriously screwed-up with the universe. It was the only possible explanation.

"Did you just call me 'adorable'?" she asked, just to confirm that she wasn't imagining things; it sure as hell wouldn't be the first time she'd drunk herself to that point.

"Yeah," Lilly said, quiet but resolved. "Yeah, I did. And you are. A weird kind of adorable, but adorable nonetheless."

Kat tried to make some kind of indignant noise, but all that came out was a hiccup. "Right," she said, speaking very slowly. "Are you… like… hitting on me?" She felt a frown cross her face, shooting for that same elusive indignation, but instead only coming up with helpless confusion; damn complicated facial expressions. "'Cause… I dunno how to break this to you, Lil… but you ain't my type."

"No!" Lilly was staring at her, wide-eyed, torn between amusement and terror and clearly trying hard to determine whether her companion was being serious or not. "No, I am _not_ hitting on you," she elaborated, "you gutter-minded tramp." And those words – spoken by Lilly Rush, of all people – were more than enough to destroy whatever hint of self-control Kat had once had over her faculties, and this time she did choke.

When she was done laughing herself half to death, she turned her eyes once again on the blonde. "One minute I'm adorable, and the next I'm a tramp?" she asked, in faint disbelief. "If that ain't hitting on me, then I dunno what is."

"Point I was making…" Lilly went on, ignoring her, "…is that it's a nice change. You, just being you. Not feeling like you need to be Miss Tough Chick of the Universe all the time. Not having to prove anything to anyone. It's kind of sad we don't see you like this more often, that's all."

Kat opened her mouth to point out that, if Lilly ever damn well let herself come out and get drunk once in a while, maybe she _would_ see it more often, but she caught a brief flash of something intangible in the other woman's eyes, and her finely-honed (even after four Mai-Tais) instincts told her to drop the subject fast. That was the problem with trying to understand Lilly Rush, the speed with which her emotions changed. It was almost unnoticeable, the flicker barely registering behind her eyes at all, but to Kat it was enough to throw her completely off-centre whenever she got close enough. For every moment that Lilly almost smiled (never entirely, not anymore, always stopping just the tiniest fraction of a moment before allowing herself to relax that much), there were three moments that followed right behind, in which she shrouded herself in mystery and frowned for reasons that nobody but herself would ever be allowed to comprehend. It was frustrating at the best of times, but now – having got her _so close_ to letting her hair down, metaphorically speaking – to lose that edge in a heartbeat and not even to know why, was beyond frustrating. At this point, Kat couldn't help wondering if Lilly did it on purpose.

It took a few long minutes of uncomfortable wordlessness, but Lilly finally spoke up again, picking up her observation right where she left off, the thread of amusement that had previously lined her voice now absent in favour of a more soft-spoken nostalgia. It was something that Kat couldn't quite grasp or understand, but which she'd nonetheless been expecting; Lilly wasn't one to explain the shifts in her emotions, nor was she one to draw attention to them, but she could no more keep them out of her voice when she spoke than she could deny their existence at all, and Kat listened attentively as Lilly asked softly, "Veronica ever see you like this?"

"Drunk?" Kat asked, blinking a couple of times. "No. _God_, no." The fervour with which she made the point startled even herself, and she realised belatedly that she should've shown more self-control, but her capacity for that had dissolved somewhere in the midst of that last Mai-Tai. "Never, Lil. I'd never…"

"I didn't mean 'drunk'," Lilly said, and there was such a depth of sadness in her voice now that Kat wanted to kick herself and she didn't even know why. "I know you're not…" She trailed off with a heavy – almost wounded – sigh, and pushed the margarita across the table. "I know you'd never let her see you drunk. But it… it leaves you exposed. Just wondering if she ever sees that. The exposed side of you. The part that's not ashamed to giggle like a little girl in a crowded room 'cause it might hurt her badass image."

It was a very difficult question, and it shouldn't have been. Kat swallowed, her throat suddenly dry, and eyed the margarita where it now sat between them. Lilly rolled her eyes and nodded, making it clear that she had no intention of drinking it, so Kat took it for herself. She needed the liquid as much as the alcohol, this time, the coolness of it sliding down her throat, giving her capacity for speech, even as the weight of the question pressed down on her heart. She didn't want to answer. She wanted to pull out her trademark '_that ain't none of your business'_, wanted to hide behind her bravado and avoid it entirely… but this evening was for Lilly, a bid at making the blonde surrender her goddamn barriers and be herself and realise that she wasn't alone. Kat Miller hated leading by example, but this was a situation where she knew all too well that not doing so could cost her everything she wanted, and so she took a long sip of the margarita – slick salt in direct contrast to the sweetness of the Mai-Tais – and shook her head sadly.

"No," she said, at long last. "Never. She sees what you guys see. Every day."

She wanted to explain why, but the salt of the margarita was closing off her throat and the only moisture in her at all now was prickling painfully behind her eyes, and that… that wasn't something she was willing to share with Lilly Rush or anyone else, not even after all the damn cocktails in Philly. Even so, she could feel the frown, puzzled and perplexed, radiating from Lilly Rush as if it were a sound that could carry through the air, and she wanted to stand up and face it down and be brave… but she wasn't brave, she was just drunk.

"You should let her see it," Lilly said, still soft and sad. "Let her hear you giggle, even if it's just once. It's a beautiful sound, Kat…" She broke off, visibly struggling to find the strength within her to continue, and Kat wanted to reach out but her fingers were stuck to the glass. "And those… those are the things you're gonna want her to remember."

It was the closest thing to a confession that Kat had ever heard from Lilly Rush, and she couldn't decide whether to embrace it like a gift, or to wrap it up in something warm and soft so that it would be kept safe like a rare and fragile creature. She wanted to thank the other woman for the words, to express somehow that she realised just how hard they must have come, and just how precious and valuable they were. She wanted, still, to reach across and take Lilly by the wrist, and hold on so tight that it would cut off both their circulation. She wanted to whisper, over and over again, that she understood and that Lilly wasn't alone… but she was slowly realising that she didn't understand and that maybe, just maybe, she didn't _want_ to understand. Not this. This wasn't what she'd been seeing, what she'd been looking for, what she'd thought she understood. This was… this was something entirely different, something alien and confusing and so heartbreakingly frightening that it stole her breath.

"Lil," she said, and she wanted to say so many things after that, so many millions of things, but the only words that fell from her lips were empty and hollow. "Have something to drink, Lil. Please."

Lilly was staring at her again, but it was different. Intense. Curious, slightly confused, but so much more. As if she was seeking out answers to some question that neither of them had ever asked. Worst part was, Kat wanted to give up that answer, to lay it down on the table like all those empty glasses, and to surrender whatever piece of herself that Lilly was asking for… but she didn't know what it was she was supposed to be giving up, and – judging by the look on her face – neither did Lil. But (in a way) it didn't matter because, in that moment, they were on the same page… they were both in the same place, because neither of them knew what it was they were searching for, and neither of them had the faintest idea what in the world could make it any less difficult, or even what _it_ was that was so difficult in the first place. And the moment stretched on, suspended in the air like evaporated moisture – all the colours of the rainbow, swirling like cocktails – until Lilly shattered it with a word.

"No."

With the moment, something in Kat broke a little too, and she slammed her open palm down onto the table so hard that the sudden sharp sting shot through her like an electric shock and sobered her for a single second. "Why not?" she demanded, frustrated and confused and so… so goddamn dizzy. "Why not?"

Lilly exhaled. It wasn't a sigh, but it was more than a simple breath. "No reason."

"Is it me?" Kat heard herself ask, petulant and vulnerable. "You'd sooner get drunk with the boys? That it? You… you're wishin' I never showed up? Like I stole your thunder?" She had no idea where the words had come from, but they struck a chord within herself as she spoke them, and she wondered why the thought had never occurred to her before. It would explain a lot, and not least of all why the blonde was so being so evasive right now. "You were the only female murder cop in Philly, and maybe it ain't so cool just bein' one of two?"

"Yeah," Lilly said, voice dripping with a depth of sarcasm that Kat couldn't help thinking was entirely unbecoming on her. "Yeah, that's what it is. Can we drop this now?"

Had she been in anything resembling a coherent state of mind, Kat would've pushed even harder; so far as she was concerned, nobody used sarcasm as a weapon but her, and it would've just served Lilly right for believing she could get away with trying to use it against her. Honestly, the blonde should've known better, and a small part of Kat (the part that had been screaming at her not to take the margarita because she'd had _enough_ to drink, dammit) was feeling more than a little chagrin at the fact that the rest of her seemed completely unable to take an action that was simply begging to be taken. No. Instead, because apparently it didn't feel like it had betrayed her enough already, it picked the worst course of action she could've imagined, and _whimpered_. Like a little girl. _Again, goddammit_. That would have been bad enough by itself, but – adding insult to injury, and beyond all control she had over it – the pitiful little noise was complemented by a pointed (and wholly impossible to ignore) wobbling of her bottom lip. Even if she lived to be a thousand years old, the tiny remaining sane part of her realised, she would _never_ live this down.

"My god," Lilly said, shaking her head in combined disbelief and disgust; unsurprisingly, this gesture was not helpful in making Kat feel better about herself. "You really are _totally_ drunk, aren't you?"

Despite herself, and despite her humiliation, Kat felt a sheepish grin touch her features, and she nodded with quite probably more enthusiasm than she should have. "Guess so," she admitted, and eyed Lilly as closely and as carefully as she could given the circumstances. "Drunk enough to prob'ly forget all this by the morning…" she continued, and the grin took on what she desperately prayed was a mischievous edge. Lord, how she hoped she'd pulled off the right expression this time. "If, y'know… if you got anythin' you feel like talking about…"

For her part, Lilly exhaled again, the sound most definitely laced with perplexion this time, and a touch of something else that Kat couldn't quite place but which she wasn't far gone enough to be beyond recognising it as bearing in it a trace – just a faint trace – of hope and promise. "Dammit, Miller," Lilly grumbled, angry and amused and everything in between. "You need to stop being so goddamn adorable when you're like this."

Kat beamed. Like a little g— _DAMMIT!_

"Level with me, Lil," she said, quickly, and as seriously as she could, in a hopeless attempt to keep the blonde's focus off her latest expressional embarrassment. "If it ain't me… what in the hell is it?"

Lilly drew in a deep breath, bracing herself. Kat said nothing; for all her pushiness, she could more than understand the other woman's need to compose herself before making a confession. Admitting to what was bothering them was something that came with great difficulty to both of them, and it was enough in that instant to see the blonde taking that breath, with the knowledge that she was preparing herself for that admission. Knowing that it was coming, and seeing that preparation, it was a turning point. A line that had been drawn under all the denial and the evasion and all the other crap Lilly had been pushing to the back of both their minds, a line that couldn't be ignored or avoided now because it was there and it was solid. If it took a minute or an hour, the admission _would_ come. Kat Miller just needed to find, somewhere within her spinning brain, the capacity for patience.

It wasn't easy. As a cop, patience wasn't a condition one often needed to indulge in. The longer you waited for a confession, the more likely a suspect would lawyer up and you'd lose him for good. The longer a suspect kept you dangling for answers, the more likely he didn't know a damn thing. Even on a good day, patience was something that Kat would struggle with… but now, faced with the most hyper-defensive human being she'd ever met, seeing her on the brink now of finally revealing herself – even just a tiny fragment of herself – the waiting, even necessary and understandable as it was, was nothing short of torture.

"Thing is, Miller…" Lilly started, and Kat released the breath she'd been holding. "I look at you, and you're… you're adorable, and you're out of control, and you sure as hell _won't_ remember any of this in the morning 'cause, frankly, you probably don't even know what day it is right now. And that's good. But I don't… I don't want that to be me. I don't want to pick up that glass and taste that stuff. I don't want to lose control of myself, because… because I've seen what drinking does to a person. And it's… it's great that you can sit there and giggle like a little girl and be this wonderful person, this _free_ person, when you drink. But I can't. That's not me." She took another deep breath, the sound shaky and uneasy, and Kat finally found enough capacity for movement to reach across the table like she'd been wanting to for what felt like hours, and took hold of Lilly's wrist – pale as alabaster and fragile as porcelain – and clung so tight she could feel the blonde's heartbeat as if it were hers also.

"It's good to let yourself go sometimes," she said, soft. "Good to lose control."

"No, it's not…" Lilly looked almost ready to burst into tears right then, and if Kat had thought for a moment she wouldn't break her neck, she would've vaulted over the table and pulled the blonde into the biggest hug she'd ever had in her life. "It's not good. I don't… I don't want…" She pulled her hand free, and grabbed the meagre remains of the margarita; Kat watched her knuckles turn whiter even than usual as she clenched her fist around the elegant cocktail glass. "I don't want to turn into _her_."

_Oh, god_. Why in the hell hadn't Kat seen this coming? She'd _known_ Lilly's mother was an alcoholic, and she'd had a suspicion that the woman had been on her mind, even from the early onset of the night; the signs had been right there, she realised, and once again had to bite back the temptation to kick herself. She should've picked up on it when Lilly had reacted to her self-involved complaints about her own mother's retentiveness; she hadn't even been that drunk back then. But it just… it hadn't made sense to think like that. It hadn't. Lilly had never shown any signs, ever, of being affected by her mother's lifestyle choice, at least not in any way that would allow it to affect her own. She'd been drunk before, Kat knew, many times. Maybe not quite so many as she herself had, but then few people in Philly had. Enough, though. Enough that it would never have occurred to Kat in a million years that she might be having second thoughts about her own drinking tendencies as a result of her late mother's. It made… it made no sense, at least none that Kat's half-drowned mind could make out right then.

"You're not her," she pointed out. It was the best she could come up with, and she flushed with the shame of it. "You're you. She's… she's been gone since…"

_Since last year_, her brain reminded her, and the realisation struck her with the force of a thousand cocktails loaded up on a ten-tonne truck. _Since the Jacobi case. Since you got shot. Since… oh, GOD_. She could've sworn she felt her head exploding as all the millions of tiny pieces that had been floating about, obscure and unrelated, finally began to slide into place. Lilly's issues didn't lie with Ed Marteson, and maybe they never had. No. They lay with the death of her mother, the loss of the one person – Kat knew – Lilly had never been able to make peace with in life. Marteson, the shooting, that had been the icing on the cake, the final nail in the coffin of a mortality that Lilly had already been struggling to face before it had even started.

"…since before you got shot," she finished, weakly. "Lil… you… all this time…?"

Lilly was smiling, wry and deeply tragic. "Cops get shot, it happens," she said, in a voice so low that Kat had to lean in if she was to stand any chance of hearing even a piece of it. "I almost got shot once before, y'know…" She tilted one shoulder in a half-shrug, and Kat frowned; she'd heard about the incident with George Marks, of course; at one point, it seemed like it was all PPD could talk about, but she'd never associated that with Lilly's coping methods. It was surreal, and probably made all the more so by the liquor still gurgling inside her. She opened her mouth to make a remark on the subject, but Lilly cut her off. "Never expected to go through my whole career without ever taking a bullet," she went on, gently. "But… _that_… seeing her lying there… you can't even imagine how that felt." A small, bitter laugh, so icy it made Kat shiver. "We're Homicide. Deal in death every day of our lives… but I swear, Miller… it was like I'd never seen it before, in my life. And I hated her… I… _hated _her."

"But she was your mom," Kat whispered, feeling the words ringing deeply within herself, seeing for just a moment her own daughter sitting there, grown up and grieving, and she wondered if those words – '_I hated her' _– would one day be falling from her lips too. "Whatever she was…" she went on, just a little shakily, "…it don't matter in the end."

"It did matter," Lilly replied, and Kat could've sworn she heard the woman's heart breaking in those three words. "It did. Even then… I swear… all I could think of was how she'd let me down again. And I knew… I knew it was coming, we both did, and I'd told myself I was fine with it. But I wasn't. And I'm not. And…" She was fighting for breath, and Kat felt her own lungs constrict in sympathy. "And I won't drink, because I'm not gonna do that. I'm not gonna turn into my mother. I won't do that. I _won't_, Kat."

"Lil…" Kat took in a deep, trembling breath; this time, she was the one needing to steady herself. She'd been more than prepared for emotional baggage – hell, it was what she'd been hoping for, a chance to get Lilly to offload some of that damn trauma of hers – but this was so far and beyond her realm of understanding she felt like she was drifting on an ocean so rough and so huge that she'd never make it back alive. But she'd started this, and it was her duty to try… so she pulled out what little knowledge she did have, and built out of that something that might stand a chance at keeping them both afloat for a little longer. "Lil, look at me. C'mon. Look at me. You ain't drunk a drop, and you're forgettin' where I come from?" The puzzlement on Lilly's face didn't abate, so she pressed on. "I'm from Narc, Rush. _Narcotics_. You think I can't see an addictive personality from a mile away? You think I'd be pushin' you to pick up your damn glass if I thought for one goddamn second it'd hurt you?" She exhaled, angry and determined and sympathetic and hopeful and so many countless emotions that her entire body was spinning and reeling and tangled up in them. "_I know you, Lil_. You ain't your mother. You're the finest damn cop I've ever seen in my damn life, and you are _better_ than this." She was gasping a little, and the room… god, the room was spinning so fast she could barely even make Lilly's face out at all. "Don'tcha think you've been hiding from this long enough? We all got our demons. We all got our ghosts, our nightmares…" Her breath hitched at that, and she cursed it. "It's how you deal with 'em, that's what makes you who you are. And you… you're so damn bright you're blinding. Hell, you're Lilly Rush. You lived through all the crap this world has thrown at you, all your goddamn life, and you've come out better and better for it. You expect me to believe you can't live through one drink?"

Twice, Lilly opened her mouth. Twice, she closed it again, completely lost for words. Kat couldn't help grinning with triumph. "You got friends, Lil. You got Scotty, you got the boys. And you got me. You got me, right here, every step of the way. You ain't alone in this. You ain't alone. You ain't _ever_ alone, Lilly."

"Okay."

Kat almost fell off her stool at that. "Okay?" she repeated. "You'll really do it?"

"Yeah. But not tonight." There was sorrow in Lilly's voice, and probably on her face too, but Kat couldn't make it out through the indistinct blur that the room had become over the course of her speech. "Not tonight. Not now. If I'm going to do this, if you're going to make me, I'm damn well gonna do it right. Find a time, find a place… get it right. I'm not about to do this just so you won't be the only one who's comatose."

Kat smiled. She couldn't really argue with that, could she? And, even if she did forget this entire conversation when the morning came… well, she could only hope that Lilly would not. "All right."

"Good. Can I go home now?"

Warmth flooded through her at the question. It wasn't closure, wasn't anything close, but – like the intake of breath that had started the whole conversation – it was a line. A marker. A tiny print that pointed in a subtle way towards something that, if it took a day or a week or a month, would come. Something that, when it did, would be beautiful, something that really would be closure, a stepping-stone towards the healing of what Kat was fairly certain was the single most complicated mind in the United States. Something that, when it did happen, she could look upon with awe and amazement and realise – if she remembered any of this – that she'd played a part in causing it to happen. It would be like watching the birth of a solar system through the eyes of God. And maybe that was the alcohol talking, but maybe it wasn't. Healing was a beautiful thing, one of the most beautiful things she'd ever experienced; if she could witness it, and know that she'd been an architect in its coming to be… it would, when it happened, be one of the proudest achievements of her career.

"Yeah… you can go home."

Lilly hadn't even waited for a response; the blonde was already on her feet, pulling her coat tight around her in preparation for the night air. Kat watched her for a moment, smiling, and moved to do the same herself. Which, she realised a little too late, was a very stupid move.

She didn't feel herself slipping, didn't feel the flurry of motion as the floor rushed up to meet her, didn't even hear the deafening clatter or feel the explosion of surprised pain as the stool toppled over and landed on her. Didn't see or hear or feel anything… but, all of a sudden, she was on her ass on the floor, with an upturned barstool sitting indecorously on top of her, and the only thing in the entire world she could see was Lilly Rush standing over her and all she could hear was laughter. And she realised thickly, as the room tilted dizzyingly on an axis she didn't think rooms had, that the laughter was coming from Lilly, and the dim distant pounding of a headache was beginning to pulse at the back of her brain, but the only thing she could see and hear and sense and feel was Lilly Rush, standing over her and laughing – really, truly, _laughing_ – and it was the most beautiful sound she'd ever heard.

Part of her, a very small part of her, knew that she had to get up. She had to push that barstool off her before she bruised, get off the floor and stand up, and she had to regain something vaguely resembling dignity. But the sound of Lilly's laughter had overwhelmed every last part of her, and she couldn't move. She couldn't breathe. She couldn't do anything, and so she didn't try. No. What was the point, when she had everything she'd wanted right there in that moment? So she let her head fall back, and she let the room spin around her, as if the entire universe was right then orbiting Kat Miller and nobody else, and just _listened_ to the sound of joy slowly beginning to re-enter the heart of a lost soul who had – for so long – forgotten what the word meant. And she'd had a hand in that. Even if that was all it was, if this was where her powers stopped… there was laughter. There was _laughter_. And she'd been the one to cause it.

If she'd died right then – if the four Mai-Tais and one margarita had been enough to end her – lord, but she would have died the happiest woman in the world.

* * *

**TBC**


	3. Chasing Daylight

_A/N: As per usual, many many thanks for all the reviews and support. In particular – Alex, I totally agree with your assertion that that TT doesn't get nearly enough screentime on the show proper; glad someone else made that point for me. And to everyone else, thanks SO much for all the kind words; I really hope I didn't keep you waiting too long for this chapter._

--

**3.  
Chasing Daylight**

* * *

Though she would never admit it in a million years, Lilly couldn't help thinking as she made her way into the office the following morning that perhaps Miller had made a valid point when she'd suggested that 'running on empty' (as she'd so eloquently put it) was a little easier when it was the aftermath to a late night out, and not the aftermath to a late night spent in restless paperwork. Not _much_ easier, of course. But a little.

Problem was, if she admitted now that it was easier, it would have to come with the precursor of admitting that the whole "_girls' night out"_ thing had been a good idea in the first place, and she had no intention of doing that. Not until the Earth started rotating backwards, at least. What did it matter if she was in a better mood this morning than she had been for… well, for longer than she'd care to acknowledge? That didn't make it a good idea. Didn't mean that Miller had been _right_. No. She'd wanted to drown her own sorrows over Delaney, and Lilly had just been a convenient drowning partner. All that '_better to be running on empty after a kickass night'_ talk had been BS; Miller had just been really lucky that she'd got it right, that was all. There was no skill in luck, Lilly knew, and she had no intention of congratulating Miller for it.

Not that Miller would be in any condition to accept those congratulations, even if they were offered, she mused with a chuckle. She hadn't arrived yet, but there was no doubt in Lilly's mind that, when she did, it would be accompanied by the world's most oppressive hangover. It was a sight that Lilly simultaneously dreaded with sympathy, and looked forward to with a malicious sort of excitement. While the thought of seeing any one of her colleagues suffering was naturally abhorrent to her, the simple fact of the matter was that Miller had brought this particular headache upon herself… and Lilly was going to make sure that she had a front-row seat in the 'It Serves You Right' theatre when the other woman did show up and started knocking back coffee like it was oxygen.

The thought was almost enough to pull another smile to her face, but it was one that she (hopefully) managed to hide effectually by removing her coat and busying herself about her desk for a handful of minutes, and pointedly avoiding the curious looks the boys were giving her. They knew better than to ask after her peculiar early-morning mannerisms, anyway, and – besides which – it wasn't as if there weren't far stranger things happening within the walls of Philly Homicide at any given time. Still, there was no ignoring the puzzled (and, yeah, maybe just slightly worried) frown that crossed the face of Scotty Valens as he observed the speed with which she tried to conceal her face. A small part of Lilly couldn't help being slightly offended that he'd be so overtly concerned about her when there wasn't even anything clearly wrong, but the vast majority of her was rather warmed by the knowledge that he cared enough to worry. It was hard to find loyalty like that in the modern world, and all the more so as cops. Scotty was one of a kind… that was for sure.

"Mornin', Lil," he said, standoffishly, but she smiled a little at the obvious curiosity behind his voice. No doubt Vera and Jeffries – occupied as they were by the morning's Sudoku puzzle – would completely miss that hint of affection in the younger detective's voice, but Lilly most certainly didn't and (though she once again would never admit it in a million years) she couldn't deny feeling just a little bemused. Even when there was nothing wrong, when she was feeling better than she had in months, she could always count on Scotty to worry about her. It was both reassuring and frustrating in equal measure, and she had to fight the temptation (playful as she was feeling at that moment) to lean over, smack him upside the head, and tell him to stop being an old woman.

"Morning," she returned, raising her head to fix him with a cynical gaze; it was one that told him everything that he needed to know – that there was nothing wrong, that she knew he was concerned, and that she was simultaneously grateful and annoyed by this fact – without either of them needing to actually speak the words or even acknowledge that the moment had existed, and he quickly buried his head in some evidence.

Brief as it was, the exchange must have caught the ear of Nick Vera, as he cut himself off in the middle of berating poor Jeffries for miscalculating a particular number on the Sudoku grid, and turned his attention to Lilly with a too-cheerful wave. "Mornin'," he echoed, and Lilly returned the sentiment once again; she couldn't help wondering, just for a moment, if it would make the entire morning routine just a little more bearable if she'd thought to record a tape of herself saying '_good morning'_, and let it throw out the same damn greeting two-dozen times every day. As if reading her mind, Jeffries refrained from uttering the same word, and simply allowed his 'hello' to be said through a polite but simple nod. Lilly smiled, warm and genuine and – above all – grateful.

It was odd, she thought, how they each had their own deep-set reactions to each other in the early morning. Pre-coffee, it was easy to be cranky and unpleasant, especially in a job that so often required five or fewer hours' sleep. In a way, it was hardly surprising that Lilly's sleeplessness and late-night habits had gone unnoticed by all but the most perceptive members of the team; it was so common for them to pull all-nighters and barely have time to take a shower and change their underwear before starting a new day, there was nothing unusual in one of them looking a little more haggard than usual on any given morning. Lilly had no doubt that, if Miller hadn't been pulling an all-night session of her own the previous evening, she would never have noticed the fatigue in Lilly's eyes when the morning came and the workday started. Maybe she was underestimating her colleague a little, but it was simply the nature of what they did that fatigue was – more often than not – a pre-requisite for it.

"Hey," Vera said thoughtfully, snapping Lilly out of her reverie with a sense of timing that was so coincidental she couldn't help wondering if it had been engineered specifically to prove her inner musings completely wrong. As it turned out, a coincidence was all it was (far be it from Nick Vera to ever be the perceptive one, anyway), the word immediately followed by others on a different subject entirely. Or, if not entirely, at least _mostly_, so far as he was aware. "You seen Trouble this morning?" he asked, casually, and Lilly had to use every ounce of self-control she had to keep from laughing at the nickname; it certainly wasn't uncommon for Vera and Miller to be throwing out vaguely insulting nicknames for each other, but the association between Kat Miller and 'trouble', in the aftermath to her drunken antics of the previous night, was almost enough to set Lilly off in a fit of laughter that would've had her sectioned before she could explain it. Thankfully, Vera didn't give her the chance to react, instead pushing on with his line of enquiry. "It ain't like her to be late…" he finished, slightly less casually.

"Trouble?" she heard herself repeating, before she had the chance to stop herself, and she had to lapse into a fit of coughing to keep her amusement in check.

Vera shrugged. "Suits her, doesn't it?" he asked, and Lilly coughed even harder.

"You okay, Lil?" Scotty ventured, bravely.

"I'm fine," she replied, a little too quickly. "Probably coming down with a cold or something." She shook his concern off with a tilt of her head, and fixed her attention firmly back to Vera. Oh, she'd be the leading voice in the inevitable mocking of Kat Miller as soon as the woman found the courage to show her face… but she wouldn't cast the first stone while she was still absent. No. Not until she was there to defend herself. There were rules about this sort of thing. "Not seen her," she said, mirroring Vera's feigned casualness. "Sorry, Nick."

He grunted, muttering something about lazy-ass women under his breath, and climbed to his feet. Moving almost without conscious awareness of having done so, Lilly found herself following, trailing behind his oversized shadow until he reached the kitchen. She stood there for a moment or two, uneasy, and waited for him to ask if she wanted a cup of coffee or something; when the offer never came (and, she realised, it had been rather foolish to expect one from him in the first place), she sighed and steeled herself. This wasn't the sort of thing that came easily to her – intervening on behalf of her co-workers (she'd never use the word 'friends', even if they were), and she couldn't shake the sense of stepping over some invisible line or another simply by standing here at all. Miller would kill her, she knew, if she'd even suspected Lilly had been entertaining thoughts of broaching this subject with Vera, let alone actually going through with it, but some small and strange part of her – probably the same small part that was half-tempted to admit it was grateful to Miller for taking her out in the first place – felt that she owed it to both of them to do what she could to ease the situation.

"You might want to stay away from her, when she does come in," she suggested.

Vera's hand froze, suspended in mid-air over the coffee-maker, and he turned to frown at her with an expression that – had it not been uncharacteristically genuine – would've been funny. "Huh?"

Lilly sighed. "She's still mad at you," she offered, waiting in vain for the confusion to leave his face and be replaced by something resembling recognition or understanding. When neither emotion was forthcoming, and the confusion only seemed to deepen, she rolled her eyes, and pressed on. "Over the Delaney thing." Still no hint of familiarity in Vera's face, and Lilly felt a frustrated breath escape her; this was the reward she got for trying to play peacemaker – a clueless primate in Nick Vera, and an inevitable lecture about meddling when Miller finally showed up. "Your little 'debate'," she went on, resolved. "She took it to heart, kinda. If you ever want to hear the end of it, you should think about offering an apology… or flowers."

At this, Vera's frown deepened, the confusion easing out of it to be replaced by perplexed irritation. "You kidding?" he spluttered, an amalgamation of anger and amusement. "D'you know what she'd do to me if I bought her flowers? My health insurance doesn't cover that!"

"Don't be so sure," Lilly heard herself retort, a chuckle disguised as a grimace. "Last night, she was one drink away from buying _me_ flowers." It wasn't until Vera's jaw hit the floor, about a second later, that she realised what she'd said; so much for not initiating the Miller Mocking until she was there to defend herself. Oops. "All I'm saying," she went on, quickly, "is don't underestimate the woman. Ever. 'Cause your health insurance definitely won't cover _that_."

Evidently, and somewhat predictably, Vera hadn't heard a single word more than what he'd wanted to hear, and he was still staring at her with his mouth wide open long after she'd finished speaking. Lilly sighed once again, and let herself lean against the doorframe while she waited for him to realise – or, more likely, not realise at all – that he was being inappropriate. In that moment, she rather wished she'd listened to her common sense and kept quiet on the whole subject. Anyone else would've taken the advice and run the hell away, but not Nick Vera. She should've known better, she mused, and she blamed the late night for dulling her common sense before meeting Vera's slack-jawed hysteria with a rolling of her eyes.

"She got drunk?" Vera demanded, when he'd regained sufficient control of himself to venture speech. "Like… _drunk_, drunk?" His eyes were wider than Lilly had ever seen them, filled to overflowing with every imaginable emotion, from glee to horror to hilarity to jealousy to outright disbelief. "And _you_ saw it?" In defiance of the Laws of Physics, his eyes managed to grow even wider at that realisation. "Did… did you get drunk too?"

Under most circumstances, Lilly might have taken offence to the question. Vera was always the first to throw out cynical disbelief whenever she implied that she might've opted to go out for the night, and the undisguised disdain in his voice as he posed the question now implied that – whatever she said in response – he wouldn't believe a word of it. Granted, he was usually accurate (and infuriatingly so) when he called her on her '_I'm not having trouble sleeping, I'm a party girl …_' BS, but he didn't need to know that. He should've had the decency to believe her whenever she explained why she was already awake when they got called in to examine some new piece of evidence at an ungodly hour in the morning; it was none of his business to even ask in the first place, and he had no right to question the answer she gave him when he did ask.

For a few moments, she was tempted to lie about this, as well, just so she could see that selfsame disdain painting itself across his face; if she'd thought for one second that Miller would be in any frame of mind to back her up and keep the fabrication going, she would certainly have opted for that course of action, but she knew – even if Miller didn't remember anything at all from the previous night (and Lilly was rather sincerely wishing that would turn out to be the case) – there was no chance that she'd forget the blonde's stubborn sobriety throughout the evening. It was payback, she supposed; she'd denied Kat her fun the previous evening, and now it was Kat's turn to refuse Lilly hers. Difference was, she thought, _her_ fun was actually entertaining, while Kat's was… not.

"Nah," she said, eventually, watching Vera's face fall so fast that she could almost believe she'd told him his puppy had died in a tragic lawnmower accident. "Didn't need to. She was drunk enough for the both of us." She smiled a little at that, but – as was always the case when she was at work – the moment passed quickly, and she'd returned her focus to its proper place before she had a chance to fully appreciate the moment. "And you can wipe that look off your face," she went on, colder. "You're the reason she got drunk in the first place."

Had she been anyone other than Lilly Rush, she would've completely missed the flash of anxiety that darted through Vera's still-too-wide eyes as he absorbed that assertion. As it was, she could no more miss it in Nick Vera than she could have missed the same in a murder suspect. It was her job, her livelihood to notice these things, and it was something she did in any situation presented to her, however casual. Oh, he covered the expression easily and casually, with a speed that could only have come from someone who knew perfectly well how fast she would pick up on it (because she had no doubt that, for all his bravado, he would've picked up on exactly the same if it had been coursing through her eyes instead), but in the instant it was there, it was clear as the sunlight that was gradually beginning to peek in through the half-shrouded windows.

"'Cause of the Delaney thing?" he demanded, finally picking up on her earlier point. There was nothing but disdain and distrust in his voice, but his eyes told a different story entirely and there was nothing he could do this time to keep the concern from rising within them.

Lilly nodded. "She compared you to him, you know," she said gently. "And that was _before_ she got drunk." His face darkened visibly at that, and Lilly felt her heart go out to him in the moment; she'd felt at the time that he hadn't deserved the comparison, and she was more convinced of it now than ever. And maybe that had been crossing a line, maybe she should never have confessed that much to him in the first place, but if it did the job of hammering home just how important the subject was, then it was a risk worth taking, so she dismissed the discomfort with a half-shrug and a frown that he finally seemed to take seriously. "Look, it's none of my business. You two aren't happy if you're not fighting about _something_. But when she's dragging me to some sleazy bar in the middle of the night because you've pissed her off…" She trailed off for a single quiet moment, just allowing the to words speak for themselves and drowning in the sudden uncharacteristic seriousness that now clouded Vera's usually-jovial features. "That is _not_ going to happen again, Nick."

The words came out sounding infinitely more defensive (and just a little more aggressive) than she'd intended, and it surprised her just as much as it surprised Vera. She'd expected the comment to come out with a faint air of irony, expressing her distaste for Miller's venting methods far more than anything else, and yet there was no denying the protectiveness that seeped into her voice as she spoke. As if she was making the point, not just for her own sake, but for Miller's as well. As if, though it really was none of her business, she _wanted_ it to be. As if, by opening up that tiny part of her the previous night, it had become her duty to give something back. Kat Miller didn't need protecting or defending, she knew. But it didn't hurt to have someone watching your back every now and then, did it? Kat had hers, she'd made that perfectly clear in the throes of her drunkenness; maybe it was time for Lilly to step up to the plate and give a bit of that loyalty back.

Looking at it now, however, it was easier said than done. It took every instinct she had not to turn around and make the point again and again that she was talking about the sleazy bar and not the idea that maybe Vera's insensitivity had cut Miller a little too deeply. Lilly was loyal, sure, but it was the sort of loyalty that was never really thought about, and certainly never spoken aloud. It just _was_, like so many things that circled around her. She cared deeply for each and every one of her colleagues, but that wasn't the same as making a bid at actively protecting them from a perceived hurt. That was something different, something far beyond her comfort zone, even had it been Scotty – arguably the most powerful of all her unspoken kinships. But, even as she felt her mouth opening in a bid to salvage her self-respect and repair the damage her words had done, she knew it would be futile to even try. The look on Vera's face told her everything she needed to know, and she let her mouth slide shut again without another word as, sighing, she watched him watching her.

"Damn women," he muttered. His eyes were still clouded with a solemnity that he'd deny if she called him on it, but the familiar carelessness was now slipping slowly back into his face. "You two ain't gonna start pulling that 'female solidarity' crap on the rest of us, are you?"

Lilly raised an eyebrow. "You scared?"

"Terrified," he said, with more sincerity than she'd ever heard from him.

Despite herself, she smirked. "Good."

Finally remembering why he'd come into the kitchen in the first place, Vera turned back to the coffee-maker, and poured himself a cup. "Look," he said, in a tone of voice so patronising that – had she not already been on his side for this whole debacle – Lilly would've kicked his ass herself. "I'm not gonna start apologising for something I didn't do. Or say. Or whatever. 'Sides, everyone knows Miller ain't happy unless she's whining. I'm just keepin' her happy."

Giving up the ghost on what was clearly a lost cause, Lilly threw up her hands in surrender. "Okay," she said, pulling the coffee-maker out of his hands before he'd even finished pouring. "You got a death wish, there's nothing I can do. But the least you could do is not drain that thing dry." She smiled a little wryly, and studied the pot for a moment to determine whether there was enough left for her to pour herself a cup, too. "God knows, she's gonna need this stuff when she drags her ass in here."

"When _who_ drags their ass in here?"

Lilly raised her head and blinked. Standing in the doorway, looking very much like she'd spent the night underneath a ten-tonne rock, stood Kat Miller; she was studying the two of them, eyes narrowed in suspicion, visibly trying to figure out exactly what Lilly had been saying about her. Fortunately – or rather unfortunately, depending on whose side it was seen from – Lilly never had the chance to say anything, before Vera leaped in with his trademark insensitivity, and a grin that she knew wouldn't disappear for a decade.

"You," he grinned, taking a couple of steps towards her, and Lilly watched helplessly with the air of someone about to witness a car crash. Vera, for his part, closed the distance between himself and Miller, standing so close that Lilly wouldn't have blamed the other woman one bit if she'd picked that moment to punch him for invading her personal space. He stood there for a moment, so close that the air between them crackled with tension, and studied her with an intensity that he seldom even gave evidence. "Jeez," he said. "You look like you got hit by a truck or something." He turned to Lilly with a grin that was blinding for all the wrong reasons.

Miller raised her head to glare at him, eyes flashing dark. "You wanna get the hell out of my face, or you want me to punch you in yours?" she demanded, and there was such a depth of rage in her voice that even Lilly was caught off-guard by it. Vera, for his part, took the hint and sauntered out of reach with typical blasé casualness; he paused to grab his coffee cup before heading out, brushing past Lilly on the way.

"You know her problem?" he whispered, conspiratorially, as he passed; even before he continued, Lilly knew the observation would land her in trouble, and winced. Of course, he didn't disappoint, grinning like a naughty schoolboy as he went on, "She's too damn _serious_."

At that allegation, flashes of the previous night tore unbidden through Lilly's mind. Miller, singing and giggling and staring at her with such tangible confusion, emotive as a child, laughing one minute and pouting the next. On the floor, looking up at her through the eyes of someone that was on the very brink of passing out, the barstool sprawled over her like an immoveable weight pinning her down. And, for all her self-discipline and professional control, there was nothing that Lilly Rush could do right then to keep from laughing. It was wrong, and – strictly speaking – it wasn't funny, but it was beyond her power to keep the mirth inside as Vera strolled out of the kitchen like the cat that ate the canary, and Miller stood there glaring at her like… well, the canary.

"Sorry," she said, when she'd regained some shred of self-control. "He… he said you were too serious." Another wave of amusement rained down upon her, but she kept herself on the right side of it. "Sorry," she repeated, and took a tentative step forwards, coffee-maker in hand. "Here…" She moved to pour a cup of the unpalatable stuff, but Miller stopped her with a wave and a (very careful) shake of her head.

"No thanks," she said, grimacing.

Lilly chuckled at that, her expression a perfect meshing of sympathy and smugness. "You look like crap," she said gently. "You should just go back to bed and stay there. I'll talk to Will."

"The hell with that," Kat muttered, head in her hands. "Girl don't push a goddamn _person_ outta her body… take a bullet… endure all the crap they put us through in Narc… stare down Death in Homicide… and then get taken outta commission by a lousy _hangover_." She yawned. "'Sides, it was worth it."

"Yeah?" Lilly replied, smiling a little ironically. "You get any sleep at all?"

A low moan escaped Miller as she shook her head. Lilly felt her own brain pulse with sympathetic pain, but that wasn't enough to wipe the cruel hint of satisfaction that crept across it once again. "Damn room wouldn't stay still," Kat confessed. "Every time I closed my eyes, it was like…" She frowned, just a pale spectre of the too-adorable confusion that had been inked like a brand across her features the night before. "I don't even _know_ what it was like."

Ignoring her protests, Lilly shifted the coffee-maker again, and this time she did pour a cup. "Drink," she instructed, kind but insistent. Miller grumbled but took the cup from her anyway. As she stared moodily into the depthless black liquid, Lilly set about repairing whatever damage Vera had done to the kitchen area. "Y'know," she said, thoughtfully, "when the room's spinning like that… it's supposed to help if you lie on your front, and keep one hand on the floor." She shrugged, feeling the weight of Kat's puzzled frown now upon her, and kept her own focus directed elsewhere.

"Where'd you hear—" Miller started, then cut herself off with a tiny noise that sounded like it may have been an '_oh_'.

She didn't need to finish the question, and Lilly didn't need to answer it. _Live with an alcoholic for long enough_, Lilly thought, _you pick up a few good tips_. Aloud, she said nothing, but found herself staring deep into the dregs of what remained within the coffee-maker, suddenly feeling so many countless emotions, all at once, that she couldn't keep them straight and only knew that none of them were the amusement that had tickled her so completely just minutes earlier. Anger, hatred, bitterness, love, loneliness, pity… all sparking out from her like she was the epicentre of some emotional earthquake, demolishing everything in their path. Or, rather, they would have been, if there was anything in their path to be demolished. As it was, there was nothing. A void, a great empty void, filled with nothing but Lilly Rush and her emotional earthquake, so they could do nothing – _destroy_ nothing – but herself… and, hell, she was already there. And, suddenly, it wasn't laughter she was fighting back, but tears, and she felt her jaw clench and her eyes tighten, but she couldn't bring herself to say or do anything at all.

"Oh," Miller said the word aloud, so softly that Lilly almost didn't hear it.

She stopped, took a deep breath, and there was sadness in that too, so tangible that Lilly could almost take hold of it and cling to it like it was a lifeboat in the hurricane that was her consciousness. A couple of times, Miller opened her mouth to speak, but cut herself off; Lilly desperately wanted to scream at her to say something, anything. Even if it was just some worthless apology for not saying what Lilly hadn't wanted her to say anyway. Even if it was just to change the subject to something completely different. Even if it was just that she was feeling too crappy to stay and that she was going to go home after all. Anything. _Anything_. If she really did know Lilly Rush like she claimed she did, then she'd do that. She would. She—

"I wish you hadn't waited till _now_ to tell me that," Kat muttered, at last.

And, just like that, the bubble of pain wobbled and broke. It didn't shatter, didn't dissolve, didn't disappear in some explosive flash of Hollywood smoke… but it broke. The noose around the neck of her emotions loosened enough that she could see something in her future that was maybe greater than the loneliness and the loss and the hatred and the love. It was enough, for the moment, to bring her back from the edge of that despair, to remind her that she was at work, that she had a job to do, and that now was not the time.

"Wouldn't have made any difference, either way," she pointed out. "You were… pretty far gone." A low chuckle left her lips, almost of its own accord, and she watched it go with a sad sort of awe. She hadn't expected it, didn't even know where it had come from, and yet to feel it leave her now was like feeling the ghost of her former despair doing so as well. Not forever, of course. But for this moment. Miller had been the one to remind her of what troubled her, but she was also the one now driving it out of her. "Just… remember it for next time," she added, almost as an afterthought, and watched Kat straighten up in surprise.

"There gonna be a next time?" she asked, voice high-pitched in disbelief.

It wasn't until she'd fully digested the question that Lilly realised what she'd said. The words had leaped out of her without even consulting her brain, apparently, and now she found herself blinking in undisguised shock at the fact that she'd allowed them to reach the ears of a woman who would certainly hold her to any promise of repeating the previous night's fiasco. "I dunno," she said, eventually. "You tell me. If there is… will it involve songs from musicals?"

An involuntary laugh erupted explosively from Kat's lips, followed immediately by a pained curse-word. "Don't," she moaned, cradling her head in her hands. "Don't make me laugh. It hurts."

"I'll bet," Lilly retorted, icily. "Now you know how I felt, singing 'Cabaret'."

Miller's face lit up at that, but she managed to refrain from actually laughing this time. "You brought it on yourself," she remarked. "If you'd've just let yourself loosen up in the first place…"

"Right," Lilly muttered, shaking her head. She could feel Miller's eyes on her, and raised her own to meet them; the other woman was studying her, a thoughtful half-smile playing at her lips, and Lilly felt another chuckle bubbling just beneath the surface as she absorbed the heady mixture of confusion and bemusement painting themselves across Miller's weary features. Taking the expression as that of a tragically hung-over human being who was desperately trying to piece together the missing shards of memory, Lilly allowed a sympathetic grin to make its way (reluctantly) to her face. "Do you remember anything _at all _from last night?" she asked.

Had she not been so blanched by that unpleasant 'morning after' pallor, Lilly would never have noticed the sheepish flush that was now colouring Miller's cheeks. She opened her mouth to answer the question, but quickly shut it again without saying a word, and Lilly couldn't help frowning a little in puzzlement. Reading anything behind the eyes of Kat Miller was difficult at the best of times; invariably, whatever one believed they were seeing would turn out to be completely misleading… and trying to determine now whether she was torn between admitting she'd forgotten everything, or admitting that she hadn't, was utterly impossible. Not least of all because, from where Lilly stood, she could see a believable motive for wanting to deny either side of the coin.

In the first, nobody would ever want to admit that they'd drunk so much that they couldn't remember anything; it was the ultimate in alcohol-induced shame, Lilly knew, and she could easily understand Miller not wanting to confess that particular shortcoming. On the other hand, maybe she had an even greater motive for denying that she hadn't forgotten anything. Lilly herself remembered all too well the serious turn their conversation had taken towards the end of the evening, and she certainly wouldn't have put it past Miller to be second-guessing her and assuming that she herself would run a mile if she found out that conversation wasn't about to be lost in the void of memory. They both knew – though Lilly wanted very much to deny this fact – that Lilly wasn't the easiest person to break through to, and there was no doubt in both their minds (at least, in her own, and in Kat's if the woman _did_ remember the conversation) that she'd only taken that step forward, had only allowed her darkness to be brought to light because she'd assumed Miller _wouldn't_ remember. It was easy to have a conversation, she knew, if that conversation would never be touched upon again. Far more difficult to have one and know that it would be broached again in the future.

"I…" Kat started, and her eyes burned into Lilly's, seeking out something that – even if she'd wanted to – Lilly didn't know enough about to volunteer it. She allowed her defences to loosen ever so slightly, though, allowed Miller to see just the hint of curiosity and concern behind her disdainful expression, and hoped that would be enough to make the decision for her. Which, apparently, it was, because Miller continued only a few moments later. "I…" She sighed. "Yeah. I remember. Guess I wasn't as drunk as I thought I was."

The embarrassed flush darkened Miller's face even more, and Lilly heard herself sigh. It was a sigh, she realised too late to keep it inside, that was laced with both horror and relief. The horror, she'd expected; the look on Kat's face as her eyes narrowed in hangover-induced discomfort suggested that the futile hesitation had been for Lilly's sake and not her own, and Lilly could more than understand why. It was humiliating, painful almost, to know that the part of herself she'd revealed would remain in both their minds forever, and Lilly couldn't help cursing herself for allowing her admission to ever come to pass in the first place. Oh, it had made sense at the time; hell, it had seemed like the best of all possible worlds – keep Miller from pushing those damn drinks at her, get the confession that had been eating her alive off her chest, and not have to deal with the repercussions of having opened up because the one person who'd heard it was so damn wasted she wouldn't remember. She hadn't counted on this, and the horror swelled as she caught the flash of empathy and sorrow touch Kat's face for just the briefest of moments before the thick hangover discomfort returned and washed any other emotion away.

But, coupled with that horror, was intangible and yet unavoidable relief. The hard part was done, she'd found it within herself to make that confession. It was out in the open, and nothing in the world could take it back and make it unspoken again. And, yeah, it had felt good… to share that part of herself, even with the knowledge that it was only for that moment, that single fractured second in which Lilly Rush trusted another human being enough to lay it bare. To not worry about having judgement passed on her. To speak from the heart instead of the mind, for once in her life, and to know that there would be no consequences because Miller had been nothing if not persuasive about that. And maybe a tiny part of her _had_ regretted the knowledge (or, as it had turned out, presumption) that it was falling on deaf ears. Wonderful, perceptive, insightful ears… but deaf ones, nonetheless. It had been a tragic sort of bittersweet, and one she'd met with combined joy and sorrow, both of which merged together in one indefinable mass of seething emotion as she looked now upon the face of the woman who'd heard it all and now remembered it.

Kat's eyes were dark, but whether that was with sympathy or with suffering, Lilly couldn't tell. The rest of her face, though, was twisted into an expression of deepest apology. "I'm sorry, Lil," she said quietly, and rested her head against the wall. "I thought I'd forget. I… I usually do." She exhaled, the sound coupled with another groan, and despite herself – despite the invasion of privacy by Kat's not having forgotten like she'd promised she would (as if it were her fault) and her own inability to figure out how she really felt about it – Lilly nonetheless felt her icy heart melt just a little, and put a steadying hand on Miller's shoulder.

"Drink your coffee," she instructed, in the same tone of voice she'd used on her mother more times than she'd care to remember (and the thought was enough to cause another thrill of relieved horror to course through her). "If you want any chance at surviving the rest of the day, you're gonna need it."

Shaking her head carefully, Miller put the cup back down on the counter. "Can't," she said simply, and stepped away from the wall, reaching into her pocket and pulling out a packet of cigarettes. "Gonna go for a smoke…" she went on, a wry smile crossing her lips as her eyes darted once again over the dark liquid that sat untouched in the cup she had just abandoned. "Gotta be better for my health than that crap."

Lilly shook her head, in combined disgust and amusement, but didn't argue. Grateful for the lack of judgement, Kat shot her a near-blinding grin, and turned to leave. For a single heart-stopping moment, Lilly almost believed she'd gotten away without having to deal with the aftermath of the conversation she never should've had in the first place. Miller was perceptive and insightful, she'd know better than to push the subject, right? She'd realise that Lilly was torn between that horror and that relief, torn between humiliated anger at herself for having opened up in the first place and joy at having had that moment of trust and… yeah, _friendship_… wherein she hadn't been ashamed to do so. She'd know that pushing it was a bad idea. Kat had claimed, so many times in that one night, that she understood Lilly Rush, that she knew her. Did she know enough of her to let the subject drop without another word?

Miller paused in the doorway, leaning against the frame and breathing a little too hard, and Lilly felt her heart sink. _No_, she thought, more than a little bitterly. _She doesn't know you at all_.

"We all got our demons," Kat whispered, and she was gazing out into the office so Lilly couldn't see the look on her face, but she could feel the tension in the other woman's posture as if they were standing flush against each other. The words echoed in Lilly's head as Kat spoke them, repeating word-for-word her speech from the previous night. "We all got our ghosts, our nightmares…" She let out a tiny sound that Lilly assumed was a headache-induced groan, but which – in retrospect – she realised sounded nothing like that. "It's how you deal with 'em, that's what makes you who you are." Finally, she turned back, eyes burning deep and dark, and Lilly could do nothing but stare at her. "I _am_ sorry, Lil. But… think about it, okay? Just… think about it."

And, before Lilly had the chance to say anything, she was gone.

Lilly stood there in silence for a few long minutes, her mind reeling from the conversation. Horror and relief, still, swam through her mind like hungry sharks, feeding on the trace revenants of laughter and fun that had also been borne of that night. The image of Miller, losing her balance and falling over, staring up at the ceiling as if it held within it the secrets of the universe, so bewildered and so overwhelmed by nothing at all, while the barstool sat on top of her as if it owned her… the memory of that damn song, 'Cabaret', and the humiliation coupled with undeniable amusement at the simplicity of the moment… they all painted over the grief and the sorrow and the knowledge that she _would_ have to deal with her demons one day – and one day soon, if Miller would have anything to say about it. Whatever cans of worms the night had opened up… it had brought with it that laughter, that humiliation (on both their parts) and that wonderful, wonderful freedom. Maybe it was worth the suffering she knew she'd feel as soon as she dwelt upon the realisation that her most carefully-concealed secret was now common knowledge – or, at least, known to herself and the only other woman on the team – maybe it was worth it, for the sake of remembering those flashes (brief and fleeting as they had been) of laughter. Maybe.

Eventually, struck by the realisation that she couldn't hide in the kitchen forever, she grabbed the discarded cup of coffee, and stepped back out into the office. Painfully aware of the glances Vera was shooting her, she made her way back to her desk, hoping beyond hope that he'd stay quiet. And, if things had panned out differently, maybe he would have. But, as it was, he found himself faced with the one kind of temptation they both knew he'd never be able to resist, and Lilly felt all hope of escaping the day without further enquiry dissolve into non-existence as Scotty (ever her saviour, and now her downfall), coughed delicately and spoke.

"You okay, Lil?" he asked, ever the compassionate partner. "Even that crappy ol' machine don't take half an hour to make one cup of coffee…" He trailed off, albeit only for a moment, catching the dangerous look in her eye, before pressing on, resolved. "An'… you've been actin' kinda weird all morning."

Lilly shifted to respond, her '_it's none of your business'_ mask already firmly in place, but – predictably, albeit no less infuriatingly – Vera beat her to it, his trademark smirk offering a vicious counterpoint to her own expression. "I can explain that," he said, sounding so arrogant and self-satisfied that – for the first time – Lilly could almost understand why Miller wanted so desperately to punch him. "They've got this 'female solidarity' thing going on. They're _planning_ something." And, for just a moment, the smugness in his voice faded away in favour of genuine anxiety, and Lilly felt the mirth returning, flowing through her like water as if it had never left.

For his part, Scotty looked nothing short of baffled. "Female… _what_…?"

Vera released a melodramatic sigh, one that Lilly was fairly certain had to be for effect more than anything else, and she had to fight to keep from chuckling. Yeah, he was an arrogant bastard, who never took the time to think before he spoke… but he provided a service in his hopeless foolishness, and it was something that – all of a sudden, and it caught her completely by surprise – she was grateful for. As long as the focus remained on _that_, on Vera and his terror of Girl Power, it would never be put onto the one place that still haunted her. Oh, if she'd had her way, the focus would never have returned to her in the first place… but, having done so, at least Vera was performing a great service in keeping the subject free of too much solemnity. She supposed she should thank him, but – in the wake of her 'discussion' with him in the kitchen, prior to Kat's arrival – she knew it would be a bad idea. Grateful as she was for the shift in focus he'd caused, she wasn't grateful enough to willingly loose the reins of his ego to that extent. No. Nothing in the world was worth that.

"Female _solidarity_," Vera repeated, shaking his head. "Jeez, Valens. Crack a book sometime, huh?" Naturally, he didn't wait for Scotty to throw out a well-deserved retort, instead pushing on with a depth of glee that Lilly couldn't help cringing at the sight of. "Miller took Rush out drinking last night." He waited, and Lilly did too (feeling her face redden with embarrassment as Scotty's gaze turned on her in wide-eyed shock) for Scotty to finish reacting to this shameful piece of new information, before continuing. "So… the dames go out drinking for one night… next thing we know, they're _bonding_. Like, crappy Hollywood 'girl power' bonding." Scotty coughed in outright disbelief and Vera levelled a finger at him. "It's true. You should've heard the crap Rush was throwin' at me. Like it was personal 'cause I hurt Miller's feelings or some BS." Lilly felt herself blushing even more furiously now, but it was with rage instead of shame, and she had to bite her tongue to keep from exploding. Thankfully, before she had the chance to point out that Vera _had_ been an insensitive jackass, even if he hadn't realised it, he pressed on with a grin that was widening by the second, "Like they're best pals all of a sudden. You believe that?"

"Nick…" Lilly heard herself growl, voice cold and dangerous. "Be careful."

She kept her eyes on his, not out of any desire to see that damn grin still carving its way across his face, but simply because she could feel the heat of Scotty's piercing frown as it fixed on her, and – frankly – she would've sooner faced down a thousand Nick Veras in that moment than just one Scotty Valens. She was used to low opinions from Vera. Hell, the whole team were. Vera didn't throw out positivity, it wasn't what he was built for. He was a negative kind of positive, and it was a kind that was as much a boost to the morale as it was a hindrance to it. The man was a very fine line, borne of cynicism and a twisted sort of old-fashioned boyishness. He was like an overgrown teenager, a victim to his own hormones and self-involved delusions, and there was nothing anybody could do but hang on and hope that he didn't direct any of his ridiculous comments at them. The benefit lay in the fact that everybody within a ten-mile radius was treated equally. Male, female, black, white, young, old… they were all fair game, so far as Nick Vera was concerned. Nobody, whatever their circumstance, was exempt from the cut of his razor-edged wit… and, in that way, he brought about a unity between them all that nobody else in the team could ever conceive of. He was a jackass, for sure… but he was a jackass who did as much good as harm.

It was different with Scotty; there was no equality in the way he looked at anyone. Everyone was different, and he had a set of rules laid out within his mind for all of them. Lilly was his partner. Reliable, dependable, workaholic. She was Lilly Rush, and he prided himself on knowing her better than anyone else. She couldn't face him now, knowing that he knew what she'd been doing the previous night. Even if he'd congratulate her for it, applaud her for finally cutting loose, she couldn't face seeing in his eyes the knowledge that she'd opted – whatever her reasons for doing so – to spend the night drinking with a 'gal pal' than doing her job. It wasn't what he respected in her, it wasn't what he knew of her. The shame burned hot on her face, mingling once again with memories of her own contentment the previous night, and she found herself torn for a moment between laughing and crying right then. Scotty would be happy that she'd been happy, if even for a moment, she knew… but he'd know how that had come to pass, and he'd know that it hadn't involved him… and he'd be wounded by that. And, to see him wounded like that – to know that he'd feel excluded, like he wasn't a large enough part of her life to be included in her moments of freedom – no, she couldn't. She couldn't face that.

"That so?" he said, very quietly, and the fire that felt like it was consuming her face and colouring her a deeper shade of pink than she'd ever been before in her life, rose even higher.

"Yeah," she admitted, and snuck a glance at him. He was looking at her, just as she knew he would be, but he didn't look wounded. Didn't look anything at all, really, at least not anything she could put a name to. He was frowning, sort of, but it was a frown that almost wasn't a frown at all. Puzzled, but not puzzled, and she found herself frown too as she strove to understand it. "So we hung out. It's no big deal."

Vera was chortling like an ill-minded schoolboy. "One more drink, and there would've been _flowers_," he claimed, with an air of sordid triumph that told Lilly his mind was venturing to places it shouldn't be; this assertion was quite neatly confirmed as he turned back to her. "If there's a pillow-fight next time, you sure as hell better invite the rest of us."

At that, Scotty erupted into a coughing fit so violent that Lilly was rather worried he'd hurt himself; by that point, it was beyond her power to figure out whether or not it would've been the better option for all of them if he had done just that, and she couldn't help observing with no small amount of chagrin that his face was an even brighter shade of crimson than her own. "That's… one hell of a mental image, Nick…" he spluttered, and Lilly let her head drop down until it hit the desk, raising it up just to drop it back down again, the movement and the soft 'thud' of connection between head and desk softly soothing in its rhythm. This conversation wasn't happening. It _couldn't_ be happening.

Regaining some small semblance of self-control, Scotty dragged himself to his feet. His eyes, Lilly noticed with huge amounts of discomfort, had never left her… and the intangible expression that had touched his face before the choking and the redness had covered it over, was back with a vengeance now, even though the flush hadn't faded from his cheeks. "Uh… 'scuse me a minute…" he said, still sputtering. "Be right back." And, still coughing and red as a fire-truck, he bolted from the room, faster than Lilly had ever seen him move in all the time she'd worked with him.

"Was it something I said?" Vera asked, all smiles and innocence.

Unable to take any more, Lilly threw a stack of post-it notes at him. Naturally, he caught it – with one hand, no effort, and a smirk that could have floored a concrete elephant – and she promptly returned her attention to drumming out a rhythm on the desk with her head. It was going to be one of _those_ days.

* * *

**TBC**


	4. Fortress

_A/N: Once again, many thanks to those of you who've taken the time to review. Also, a brief warning to go with this chapter; the latter half deals with (or, well, tries to deal with) some rather dark and unpleasant concepts and may therein be quite difficult to read; it was definitely hard to write, and so it seems logical to throw a warning out there._

--

**4.  
Fortress**

* * *

The air was surprisingly chill for the time of year, a bitter wind lashing against the building, and Kat wished she'd had the foresight to bring a warmer coat. She shivered, jamming her left hand deeper into the pocket of the lightweight jacket, and flexing the fingers of her right against the cigarette nestled between them. These were the days she wished she would find it within herself to quit.

It wasn't for the sake of her health, and it sure as hell wasn't because of those damn horror stories about second-hand smoke killing everyone within a three-hundred mile radius. Hell, no. Days like _this_, they were the real kickers. When she was already cranky and fighting off a hangover so overwhelming it was nothing short of a miracle that her head hadn't exploded yet… days when Mother Nature, clearly knowing that she wasn't feeling great to begin with, decided it'd be fun to throw at her a wind so biting that it tore through her jacket as if it wasn't there. When all she wanted was to be indoors, drinking something that (unlike the crap at PPD) could actually be defined as 'coffee'… but every goddamn nerve in her body was screaming in desperation – in _need_ – and she could no more silence those raw, nicotine-fuelled screams than she could ignore the crippling hangover. Oh, yeah. These were the days she would've sold her soul to have that willpower.

Worst part was, the damn cigarette wasn't even worth it. Her mouth was dry, traces of whatever the hell she'd drunk the previous night still lingering heavy on her tongue, thick and cloying, and the blend of flavours only served to taint the tar-laden smoke as the taste and the smell and the sight of it filled her senses. Cigarettes and alcohol were a heady combination, she knew, when taken together… but, now, with the alcohol nothing but a stale aftertaste on her tongue, and the cigarette a fresh and new experience, they clashed like neon colours. She closed her eyes, leaning against the side of the building, and tried for what felt like the millionth time to shake off the headache that still pulsed through her with shattering insistence (even after the box of aspirin she'd knocked back earlier that morning).

It was a hopeless effort, really – if the aspirin had failed to kick the headache, there really wasn't much chance that shutting her eyes would somehow manage to succeed – and she let out a frustrated sigh, but made no bid to open them again. She'd just stand here for a minute, feeling the heat from the cigarette as it burned slowly down towards her fingertips, and letting the headache wash over her. She just needed a minute, just long enough to take the edge off the hangover, and then she'd be able to—

"Miller!"

For the second time in far fewer hours than she'd care to admit, Kat felt her heart skip a few-dozen beats as she jumped at the unexpected intrusion, the remains of the cigarette falling from her hand before she had a chance to catch it. This time, at least, she could blame the hangover for her dulled senses, which was more than she'd been able to do when Lilly had caught her off-guard the previous night, but that didn't stop a string of violent obscenities from escaping her lips as she watched her cigarette extinguish itself. "Goddammit!" she snapped. "You jackasses have _gotta_ learn not to sneak up on people."

"Where's the fun in that?" asked Scotty Valens, approaching her with a grin that – for all her irritation – was simply too damn charismatic for her to compete with.

Under normal circumstances, she would've thrown out a retort so cutting that he would have been powerless to defend himself against it… but, right at that moment, cold and hung over and now denied the reprieve of nicotine, it was all she could do to keep her head up at all, much less do anything with it, and so she settled for shooting him a glare and hoping that it carried even a fraction of the annoyance she was feeling. When he made no response to this, other than an almost imperceptible widening of that damn grin, she sighed. "What in the hell are you doing out here, anyway? You ain't a slave to nicotine."

Scotty shrugged, the gesture careless and dismissive, but – even in her less-than-perfect condition – Kat caught the trace of shame flickering elusively behind his eyes, and pounced on it. She fixed her own eyes on his, insistent and determined, and squared her shoulders. He'd worked with her for long enough now to know that she wasn't about to let the subject drop, however long he waited for exactly that to happen, and the feigned indifference fell from him like a discarded tie as he realised he didn't stand a snowball's chance in Hell of winning this particular battle of wits. So she was the one fighting down a hangover, and he was the one with all his faculties in perfect working order (or whatever passed for 'perfect working order' when Philly Homicide was involved), but she still held all the aces, and she had no intention of letting Scotty Valens – or anyone else – forget it.

"Just… needed some fresh air," he said, evasively, and she raised a disbelieving eyebrow at the obvious discomfort on his face. "Office was gettin' a little… hot…"

There was something in the tone of his voice, and the embarrassment on his face, that told Kat this was a subject she did _not_ want to pursue, so she dropped it with a puzzled frown. "You got issues, Valens," she said, simply, and his face eased back into its trademark grin at the realisation that she wasn't going to push for a further explanation. "Great big, giant-sized issues. I'm just sayin'."

Again, he shrugged, but this time the carelessness in the gesture was genuine. "Guessin' I ain't the only one," he replied, as Kat fought down the temptation to light up another cigarette. She had more willpower than _that_, dammit.

He watched her for a few moments, studying the frustration on her face and clearly trying to figure out whether she would rip his head off if he ventured to speak again. Eventually, the hesitation being more annoying than any words could have been, she inclined her head at him and scowled in such a way that suggested, if he _didn't_ just say whatever the hell he was thinking, then she would _definitely_ rip his head off. "You got somethin' else to say?" she demanded. "'Cause I really don't wanna stand around out here all day."

Scotty snorted derisively. "Yeah, right," he said, and Kat had to bite her lip to keep from lashing out. Thankfully, for both their sakes, he promptly dropped the cockiness (whether because he sensed her growing irritation, or because he was finally bored with tormenting her), and got to the point. "Ain't none of my business," he started, suddenly all kinds of uncomfortable. "But… it true that you an' Lil are bonding now?"

"Uh… 'bonding'?" Kat repeated the word, slowly, emphasising each syllable as if it were a foreign entity. The thought was a pleasant one, and she felt herself smile in spite of the headache.

"Yeah," Scotty was nodding thoughtfully. "'Cause she says… she reckons that you an' her went out last night… like… real, proper, hangin' out kinda stuff…" He paused, then continued with obvious relish, "…an' that there was _booze_."

Kat rolled her eyes. "Wouldn't exactly call that 'bonding', gutter-brain."

She would've liked to, though. Not that she'd ever admit it to anyone, least of all herself… but, yeah, she would've liked that. Bonding. 'Cause, with bonding, came the onset of a real, honest, friendship. The kind that murder cops seemed not to believe in. The kind that were so much more common in Narc because, with all the crap they were thrown into the middle of all the damn time, you had to. You wanted to stay sane in Narc, you forged alliances. You kept your friends as close as possible because, more often than not, they were the only ones – in the thick of it all, when you'd gone so far undercover you couldn't even remember which you was the real one – they were the ones who pulled you back. It wasn't like that in Homicide; the lines were so much more distinct, so much clearer, and it was impossible to cross them. They all had each other's backs, she knew that. They'd proven it, in a thousand ways, a thousand times. But it wasn't the same.

When the crisis was over, it was like nothing had ever happened. Maybe that was a bi-product of working a group whose frontrunner was the closed-off mass of emotional denial that was Lilly Rush, but maybe it was just the way things were in Homicide. Nobody ever _talked_ about anything, at least not anything that wasn't directly related to the cases, and that was a difficult thing to adapt to. Oh, she'd never been a chatterbox, and she was a firm believer in keeping her personal life _personal_… but she hadn't expected this. Maybe it was the part of her that thrived on those rare and precious moments at the end of the day where she'd finally, _finally_ get to sit down with her daughter, put the murders and the criminals behind her, and just ask '_how was your day?'_… the part of her that thrived on those simple, beautiful moments, where so little was said, but that emotional bond was stronger than anything else in the world. And those moments never happened in Homicide because, on the rare occasion that there _was_ talking about nothing in particular, it was always the boys versus the girls.

More than that, though, it was always some kind of competition, and she – ever the competitor – was always feeling the need to prove herself, to rise to whatever challenge the boys threw at her, to make them realise that girls were just as good as boys (even if none of them would ever say it, the divide between them was obvious to everyone). And maybe she tried too damn hard, because the boys seemed forget sometimes that she wasn't one of them. When Nick had made his comments about Delaney – _'guys like him make it hell for the rest of us'_ – she could see it in his eyes; he'd forgotten who he was talking to. So far as he was concerned, she was 'one of the guys', someone who could appreciate his comments, his chauvinistic arrogance, his boyish attitude. He'd forgotten that, if she'd been just a half-dozen years older, _she_ could've been one of Delaney's victims… had forgotten to even _consider_ the possibility that bastards like Delaney still walked the streets even now.

But, then, why should Nick Vera stop and think about that, when Kat Miller had tried so damn hard to prove she could stand toe-to-toe with him? Why should he stop and think that maybe his words would hurt her, when she'd worked her ass off to make sure he _didn't_ draw that line between the boys and the girls? Because it was her fault. She'd made certain he knew nothing about her, and had made even more certain that he'd never treated her like the woman she was, not when they were on the job. Her reputation mattered more, especially in the face of someone like him. So who else could she blame, when he didn't realise just how similar she was to the victims he so carelessly ignored in his chauvinistic empathy with Mike Delaney?

She could've argued the point with him a thousand times, she knew, and he'd never understand. So, instead, she'd stayed in the office and wrapped the night-time around herself, hiding in it. From him, and from herself… and then Lilly had shown up. And she'd understood. She'd defended the jackass, sure. She'd said she couldn't understand why the point meant so damn much to Kat – and maybe no-one would – but, if nothing else, she had appreciated the essence of it. She'd seen the pride in Kat's eyes, and she had never needed to ask what exactly Vera had said that was so damn wrong, because that much she _did_ know. And, yeah, Kat had clung to that. In all the time she'd been working Homicide, she'd never felt the need for that solidarity, the understanding that could only come between two people so similar… but she'd needed it then. She'd needed, in that instant, to know that she wasn't crazy, that she was – in part, at least – justified in her blinding fury. It had unsettled her, the intensity of it, but seeing the empathy in Lilly's eyes, the knowledge of what had so fired her blood… it had helped in a way that Kat hadn't ever imagined. It had made her feel, for once, that she could be a woman and she could be a cop and she could be in Homicide – that she could have her job and her reputation and her emotions – all at the same time… and, in that one moment, nobody would think less of her for it.

So, yeah, she would've given anything to believe that spending time with Lil, one-on-one, could count as 'bonding'. But did it, really? She didn't see how.

"It might be," Scotty said, quietly, and she blinked. She'd forgotten he was still there, still watching her, and her eyes focussed blearily on his face now as he frowned at her. "Vera says she was jumpin' all over him 'cause he hurt your feelings or somethin'." He paused there, and she blinked once again – for an entirely different reason. "I'm guessin' that's BS," he went on, and that goddamned grin was back on his lips. "'Cause you don't got feelings, do ya, Miller?"

Kat bit down on her tongue, so hard she was sure she'd draw blood, to keep from contradicting that remark. "Right," she said, tightly, and – surrendering to the screams in her head – fumbled in desperate search of another cigarette. For once, it wasn't the nicotine that had propelled her into action, but the need to turn her attention away that damn grin on Scotty's face. "We done here?"

"No," he said, and in that single syllable, his voice was just as tight as hers had been. Though she wasn't looking at him, she could feel the shift in his posture, and knew beyond all rationality that the smirk had fallen from him so fast it might as well have never been there in the first place. "No, we ain't." She exhaled, and raised her head back up to return in kind the scowl he was now fixing her with, even as he continued. "Listen up, Kat—" and he sounded so patronising that it was all she could do not to slap him "—I get that you're probably sufferin' the biggest hangover in history, an' I'll bet you just want me to leave you the hell alone so you can go back to givin' yourself lung cancer…" He paused, and a ghost of mischief shone behind his eyes for just a single moment. "Hell, if I'd got through even half the booze I'm guessin' you did last night, I'd be killin' anyone stupid enough to get within three miles of me right now, so I sure as hell ain't blamin' you for that." And, just as fast as it had appeared, the gleam was gone, and his eyes were deadly serious again. "But I got a point to make, here… so you sure as _hell_ better start payin' attention."

Contrary to every negative emotion she was feeling, Kat felt herself softening just a little in the wake of that, and she raised a curious eyebrow at him. "Oh, really?" she said, playfulness now mingling with the irritation. "Well, if the great Scotty Valens is makin' a _point_…"

"Shut up," he retorted, but there was a chuckle behind his voice. "Look. I dunno what you two did last night. I don't _wanna_ know…" He trailed off for a moment, and the look in his eyes suggested that he was pondering a scenario that he most certainly _did_ want to know, and Kat was just about to shoot him her most dangerous glare when – once again – the expression fell from his features as if it had never existed. "Point is, when you come staggerin' into work, lookin' like someone dropped a house on you, a guy's gotta wonder. But that ain't the half of it." Here, he paused, visibly trying to determine how best to broach the subject that was preying on his mind, and Kat gave him a moment to do so, finally latching onto a fresh cigarette and lighting it, eyes not once leaving his as he started up again. "You two must've got up to _somethin'_," he went on, resolved, "'cause you're down here tryin' to give yourself lung cancer an' fightin' the hangover from Hell… an' she's up there, probably yellin' at Vera for hurtin' your imaginary feelings… but I saw the look on her face when he was givin' her a hard time over it… an' it's like she lit right up, Kat. You know how long it's been since she got that?"

"Yeah," Kat said, very quietly. "Been a long time. She ain't had it so good, lately." The words hung suspended on the air, not through any desire of her own to keep them there, but because she was struggling to follow them up with anything helpful. And she so desperately wanted to be helpful right then. "She really lit up?" she asked, almost afraid to hear the answer, and it didn't matter which way it fell. "'Cause she didn't look like that when I was talkin' with her."

Now that Scotty Valens Smirk was neatly back in place, and he leaned against the side of the building as he grinned at her, eyes shifting from her face to the cigarette in her hand, and then back up via the scenic route. "That's 'cause you don't know her like I do," he replied, and the irony of the words caused her stomach to churn a little, memories of Lilly's confession the previous night echoing in her mind. "She thinks no-one sees anythin' more than what she wants 'em to see, right?" Silently, Kat nodded. "But she don't realise she's wearin' her heart on her sleeve the whole damn time. She thinks, if she makes like she's embarrassed, like she's pissed off, we're all gonna sit back an' believe it. An', sure, I'm guessin' she really _is_ embarrassed… humiliated, more like, 'cause her ass got caught out _enjoyin' _herself… but she sure as hell ain't pissed off." He leaned inwards, making a point of dodging the smoke, and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial hush. "Whatever the hell you did to her last night, whatever the hell you got her to do—"

Kat felt herself brighten. "I got her to sing 'Cabaret'," she confessed, and – for a few long minutes – the great Scotty Valens could do nothing but stare at her.

"—whatever you got her to do, _other than that_," he went on, eventually, still looking flabbergasted, "…it lit her right up. Like she got somethin' off her chest."

At that, memories of the previous night flooded unbidden into Kat's mind. Memories that never should have existed in the first place, of a confession that would never have come if there had been the faintest possibility of there being memories of it. Guilt surged through her like a tidal wave, and it was a sentiment that came to her like an alien concept. She didn't feel guilty. Even when she screwed up, she didn't feel guilty. She'd learned long ago to never second-guess her actions, to never stop and wonder if she'd done the right thing, because that way lay madness. It didn't do to dwell on things that could have been or should have been or might have been, and so she had never bothered. She didn't even know where the guilt came from, now, as it had hardly been her own fault that – for once – her memory hadn't failed her. And yet, there it was now, inside, clear and bright as daylight (and hurting her eyes and her laboured brain just as much too).

Oh, yeah. Lilly had got something off her chest, all right. She'd confessed to the very depths of what was bothering her, the very crux of her emotional mindset in the aftermath to her shooting. She'd opened up, in a way that Kat had truly believed she never would, and she'd done it all to _her_. Speaking to her that morning, seeing the conflict in her eyes as she'd discovered that – after all – Kat _hadn't_ forgotten what she was supposed to… there was no way she could have been lit up like Scotty said she had. No way. And maybe Kat didn't know Lilly Rush as well as her partner did. Maybe she was still the newbie who didn't know anything about anyone, but _she_ was the one Lilly had confessed to. Even if it had just been in the assumption that the confession would go unremembered for the rest of both their lives, it had happened. For all of Scotty's assertions that he knew Lilly better (and Kat had no doubt that he did, really), that had to count for something.

"No," she said, guardedly and – maybe, just maybe – a little possessively. "Nothin' like that. We just hung out. Girl stuff." She shrugged, but she could see in his eyes that he didn't believe her for a second. There was a depth of curiosity pervading every inch of his face, and it almost stole her breath to see it. He knew her, too, better than she could've imagined. He knew enough about her to know that she was lying and – while it would've been so easy to blame the hangover for her inability to lie convincingly – she somehow doubted it would've mattered either way. He was one hell of a detective, that Scotty Valens, but it didn't change the fact that it wasn't his place to know what she knew about Lilly. "I reckon you got your signals mixed, Valens," she went on, and she couldn't even convince herself with the words, so what chance did she have of convincing him? "You probably figured she was lit up, when really she was just mad at that goddamn bas—"

"Right," he interrupted, quickly. "Whatever you say."

He sounded almost… disappointed. As if he'd been expecting her to surrender Lilly's secrets to him simply because he was Scotty Valens and he was the one who knew her and it was his responsibility to understand what was on her mind, and who in the hell was Kat Miller to step in and take that away from him? In that instant, she couldn't help wondering the same thing, and it pushed her self-control to the limit not to break down right then and tell him everything she knew. Guarding the psyche of Lilly Rush was the most daunting task she'd ever face, she was beginning to realise as she looked at the disbelief in his eyes. Scotty had worked with her for twice as long as Kat had, and even he – for all his self-imposed knowledge – had barely scratched the surface. What chance did some newbie upstart from Narcotics have of holding the key to something so complicated? It would've been better in his hands… but it wasn't. It was in hers, and it was her responsibility to guard it as if it were her own. She tightened her jaw, watching him closely, and nodded. "That's right."

He stepped back from the wall and, for a second or two, she thought he was about to leave her in peace. But he didn't, pausing instead, and studying her once again. "Whatever you do," he said, speaking very slowly, and clearly putting a great deal of thought into every word. "You… keep doin' whatever the hell you did to her last night." She blinked, puzzled, and he sighed. "I ain't seen her like that since before…" He trailed off, and she felt her heart swell in empathy. "I ain't seen her like that in a long time. If you can make her light up like that, just by gettin' her to sing some dumb song from a musical… keep doin' that. An'… if there's somethin' else, somethin' you ain't willin' to share with me… then keep doin' that, too. Whatever it is, whatever the hell you got that makes her light up like that. You screw it up… an' you gotta answer to me."

Once again, he took a step back, and this time he was most definitely going to leave. "Scotty," she heard herself call. He stopped, eyeing her with a combination of curiosity and hope. "I…" she started, flailing a little; her head was beginning to pound again, so heavy and so thick that she couldn't separate her thoughts from her memories, and she needed to say something now before the two became so intricately entwined that she couldn't tell one from the other and said something they'd all regret.

"Yeah?" he asked, frowning slightly at her.

So, perfectly aware of how pathetic it was, she said the first thing she could think of. "Feelin' like hell." That much, of course, was true, but she still hated herself for admitting it… though not half as much as she hated herself for what followed. "Think I'm just gonna go home. Call in sick. Whatever." If it had been possible for the rational part of her brain to reach out and smack her upside the head, there was absolutely no doubt in her mind that – in that moment – it would've done exactly that. "You mind tellin' Will? Tell him I'll make it up some other time. But I gotta get some sleep, get my head on straight, before—"

—_before I give up completely, and just tell you everything._

Scotty was examining her, the curiosity now tainted by amusement and just the lightest dusting of sympathy. "Sure," he said, and the mischief was trickling into his voice once again. "But, FYI… you go home now, I ain't gonna let you live it down." He crossed his arms, but that goddamn grin belied the seriousness of his words, and Kat felt her face ease into a weary smile of its own. "Ever."

It was a small price to pay, she supposed, for retaining what little remained of her wits, and she allowed the echo of a soft laugh to escape her. "Like there's anythin' you can dish out that I can't take…" she threw back; had her brain not been threatening to explode if she even thought about it, she would've coupled his grin with one of her own. As it was, she let the mirth fall from her face, and studied him with a quiet intensity. "What you two got," she offered, softly, "I can't touch. This… whatever the hell 'this' is… it's somethin' different. Ain't nobody in the world that's gonna touch what you got with her, least of all me." She'd intended the words to reassure herself, a means by which to remember that she was doing the right thing in withholding information from him, but one look at his face told her that he was far more reassured than she would ever be… and so she continued, in her usual style, "So you can drop that '_you gotta answer to me_' crap… 'cause I already know it."

"Glad we understand each other," he retorted, and was gone.

* * *

The rest of the day passed in a blessed haze of sleep and aspirin… for the most part, at least. For all her convictions that she needed the time to collect her thoughts and keep from reeling in the after-effects of too much alcohol and too much emotion, the guilt caught up with Kat towards the early afternoon. Taking time off, for any reason, always left her with a bad taste in her mouth, and this time was no different. It was simply the nature of what they did, she supposed; the loyalty to their job, the dedication and the genuine passion for their chosen career path. The desire to take sick days wasn't something that had ever plagued any cop she knew, and it sure as hell didn't plague her… at least, not usually. But then, everyone was entitled to a day of weakness, right? Hell, even Lilly Rush – the staunchest timekeeper in Homicide – had taken a sick day once, and had broken about a hundred rules at the same time. Was it really so damn disastrous that Kat Miller was taking one now, too?

It was a logical enough argument, she knew, but it did little to quash the guilt. So, in a bid to do so through some kind of physical (and vaguely, if not entirely, proactive) action, she dragged herself off the couch for just as long as it took to pick Veronica up from school and take her for an ice-cream cone. The gesture, she imagined, was wholly undeserved (ice-cream, she'd decided long ago, was only ever to be offered as a reward… as much for the sake of her own figure as for the girl's), but she was feeling affectionate, and had been warmed from within by the joy that had sparked like a flame in her daughter's eyes when she'd seen her. It was a joy she rarely saw, a fire that only ever seemed to be lit by Veronica's having spent a night away from her; the secret joy that filled a young child's heart at being reunited with their mother after a day's absence, but would never ever be spoken of by either of them, on pain of the worst kind of death – that of the reputation.

The unfortunate side-effect of both the ice-cream and the reunion was that Veronica – hardly the most subdued child at the best of times – spent the remainder of the afternoon bouncing around with sugar-fuelled energy. Kat had learned long ago the subtle art of patience when dealing with a child (and, frankly, she'd sooner her daughter be touched by an over-abundance of hyperactivity than apathy), but the girl's mood was the last thing her aching head needed, and she'd had to bite her lip innumerable times as the afternoon had worn on to keep from yelling over what she knew would, in hindsight, prove to be absolutely nothing.

As a result, the unexpected (albeit intrusive) sound of someone knocking at the door, as the afternoon faded to evening, was a welcome distraction. Painfully loud, the sudden sharpness of it causing a jolt to course through her entire body (starting and ending in her brain, at the very source of all her discomfort), it nonetheless brought with it the promise of adult conversation as a desperately-needed reprieve from trying to determine which was the coolest of the Powerpuff Girls, and she leaped on it without even thinking. Shooting a glance a Veronica, who promptly resorted to keeping herself occupied by practising her latest ballet steps in the middle of the living room, she made her way – an impatient outcry of '_Do I look like the sort of person who'd wanna buy double-glazing?'_ already forming on her lips – to answer the door and silence that damn knocking.

"Hi."

Kat blinked three times, then stopped blinking completely. "…Lilly?"

Sure enough, in the place of the double-glazing salesman she'd expected, Lilly Rush stood in front of her, wearing a half-smile and offering a self-conscious wave. "Just figured I'd stop by, see if you're doing any better," she said, the half-smile widening into a full one. "Scotty said you were faking it, trying to get a day off 'cause you were too lazy to suck it up for the rest of the day." She chuckled, a little ironically, and those piercing ice-blue eyes cut through Kat like a searchlight. "So I had to see if it he was making it up or not."

So, Valens hadn't been talking crap when he'd said he wouldn't let her live it down. Kat sighed. "Knew I shouldn't have trusted him to take the damn message," she muttered, but she could feel the affection touching her eyes and knew that Lilly wouldn't be fooled by the harshness of her words.

"Yeah," Lilly agreed, but the gentle humour in her voice was belied by the intensity with which she still studied Kat for signs of hangover-induced discomfort. "You look better," she observed, thoughtfully, punctuating the point with a knowing nod. "Guessing you spent the whole day sleeping it off?"

"Most of it…" Kat admitted, looking at the floor. From the corner of her eye, she caught a flicker of motion as Lilly nodded again, and grimaced. In her head, she imagined the blonde was reliving days lost while her mother had slept off a particularly unpleasant hangover, and she wanted to kick herself (not for the first time) for not thinking things through. In her mind's eye, a young Lilly – the same age as Veronica, of course – and her sister, younger still, spent their days creeping around the house, quiet and anxious, fearful of the punishment that would no doubt come if they dared wake the sleeping monster, and she felt her cheeks flush with sympathy and humiliation. "I… I'm much better now," she finished, eventually, trying with no success to push that vision out of her mind. "Thanks for comin' down here. I appreciate it." She paused, exhaling quietly. "I really do."

"Sure," Lilly replied, shrugging, and Kat could see that there was a depth of… of _something_… behind the blonde's eyes. "Besides," she went on, not allowing Kat the time she needed to seek answers or explanations as to what that something was. "Wasn't _all_ your fault. I shouldn't have let you have that damn margarita." Her face relaxed, the uncomfortable smile replaced by a genuine one. "_Obviously_, that was what pushed you over the edge," she finished.

Kat laughed, the sound coupled by only a lingering revenant of discomfort. "Yeah. It's all your fault, really. You owe me." She grinned, but the expression faded as she caught the lingering contemplation still glimmering half-concealed behind Lilly's eyes. "You wanna come in or something?" she asked.

Whatever was bothering Lilly (if 'bothering' was even the right word to describe it, Kat couldn't be sure), she knew enough about the other woman to know that asking about it would be the last way of getting her to surrender it, especially after the previous night. And maybe that was all it was; maybe the iridescent, intangible glow was nothing more than enduring shame at knowing that Kat hadn't forgotten what she'd been told. But maybe it wasn't; Kat was pretty sure that, if she'd been the one who'd bared herself to a drunken co-worker the previous night, the last place she'd want to be right now would be standing on that drunken co-worker's doorstep. So maybe there was something more in those enigmatic eyes. Maybe… maybe Lilly really was willing to try the 'bonding' thing, like Scotty had said. And, if she was, Kat sure as hell wasn't about to risk screwing it up by _asking_ about it. Not when the person she'd be asking was the biggest flight-risk in Philadelphia. Even hung-over and messed up as she was, she wasn't _that_ stupid.

"Sure," Lilly said again. "Been drinking that crap they call 'coffee' all day. If you've got some of the real stuff lying about someplace in there, I'm gonna have to move in with you."

Shaking her head, Kat held the door open for Lilly to pass through. "Don't think Veronica would be too happy 'bout that," she pointed out, following the other woman back into her apartment. "She complains enough about this damn hellhole bein' too small… don't need any more excuses." Not breaking stride, she cocked her head to the side, calling out even as she guided Lilly into what passed for a kitchen, "V!"

Unsurprisingly given her current hyperactive mindset, Veronica came running immediately, bounding into the kitchen with an enthusiasm that Kat found exhausting to just _watch_. Her eyes lit up like stars at the sight of Lilly, and she bounced a little on the soles of her feet; one look at the blonde was enough to convince the girl that here was yet another of her mother's kickass cop buddies, and she made a show of examining of her with great curiosity… serving much to Lilly's amusement, and Kat's unrestrained annoyance.

"Don't stare, V…" she warned, the words light but carrying weight. "Lilly, Veronica. Veronica, Lilly." So far as she was concerned, that was a more than adequate introduction; moreover, she recognised that unmistakable glint in the little girl's eye, the one that said– if left unchecked – she would happily spend the rest of the night asking questions that Kat herself made a point of refusing to answer when posed to her, because she would of course have much better luck with the new and glamorous stranger… and that was something she had every intention of stopping before it even started. "We're gonna be talkin' work stuff in here," she went on, addressing her daughter. "So you're gonna be real good, go to your room, and do your homework."

Veronica pouted. "But I wanna stay. I won't make any noise…"

"I know," Kat said gently, and was suddenly all too aware of Lilly's eyes on her. A pulse of discomfort soared through her, and she grimaced. It was hard enough, trying to Be A Good Parent in the comfort of her own home, with no witnesses but herself… but to do so now, in front of the one person who knew bad parenting better than anyone else she'd ever met – the person who'd shared her feelings on that particular subject less than twenty-four hours ago, and Kat knew too well how much that had taken out of her – suddenly, it was a thousand times harder. "I know you won't," she repeated, breathing deep to keep herself from exploding. "But you know you're not allowed to listen in on work stuff."

"But _why_ not?" The pout was giving way to a scowl, and Kat felt her heart skip a couple of beats. "I'm old enough! I know what you do. Everyone at school thinks it's really _cool_." It was the highest praise a young girl could think of, and Kat felt herself soften just a little in the face of it. "Why can't I stay just once? I'll be good. I won't say nothin'…"

Kat shook her head, firmly. "We're not doin' this again," she replied, trying a little too hard to sound authoritative. "You don't listen in on work stuff. I don't want you hearing it."

"Fine!" muttered Veronica, glaring at her with a look that was so horrifyingly similar to the one she herself turned on suspects that it stole her breath for a second. "But I hear it all at school anyway, an' you can't stop that. You're just _stunting_ my _growth_." And the statement was so utterly ridiculous coming from the mouth of an innocent-looking little girl that Lilly, behind her, burst into uncontrollable laughter, and Kat was suddenly forced to turn that selfsame glare on her colleague.

"V," she said, slowly and very dangerously. "Homework. _Now_."

Veronica met her gaze, unwavering. "I _hate_ you," she said, with conviction, before turning on her heels and leaving, her exit punctuated just a second later by the explosive '_slam'_ of her bedroom door echoing off the paper-thin walls.

"Wow…" Lilly said; though Kat kept her eyes fixed firmly on the doorway through which her daughter had stormed out, she could hear the lightness in Lilly's tone and tried to focus on that instead of the words that still reverberated through her head with the same gale-force volume as the still-echoing slam. It wasn't easy, and the fact that it was Lilly – of all people, the one who'd used those same words herself the previous night – didn't make it any easier. Lilly continued, voice bright, "Teenage Years coming up fast, huh?"

Moving in slow-motion, Kat turned back to face her; the blonde was watching her with an amusement that she made no efforts to conceal, and Kat's head pulsed hard again. Memories – more memories – of the previous night flooded through her, and she could do nothing but watch them flash past at the speed of light. Lilly's anger and bitterness towards her mother, her tempered rage seething softly beneath the surface of those words – '_I hated her_' – and Kat's own fears, fuelled as they had been by alcohol, that one day Veronica would be the one sitting there, saying those same words to someone else.

It wasn't the first time Veronica had used those words against her, and it sure as hell wouldn't be the last. Kids were, after all, pre-disposed to blow the tiniest things out of all proportion and turn them into the end of the world. She knew that it didn't mean anything, that Veronica – like every other kid in the world – used words that she didn't fully grasp the concept of, just because she knew it would strike a blow. But that didn't stop the blow from stinging, and doubly so in the aftermath to that conversation with Lilly, whose eyes blazed now as the amusement burned itself right out and concern was allowed to consume everything else.

"You okay?" Lilly asked, too quietly.

"Uh huh," Kat replied automatically.

The sound, positive and affirming, had escaped her lips before she'd had a chance to stop and think about what she was saying. Of course she was okay. She was _always_ okay. And, when she wasn't… well, that was what the Mai-Tais were for. She didn't need to see that damn look on Lilly's face, the disbelieving worry. She was fine. Whatever damn sorrows she'd had, she'd drowned them the previous night. Lilly didn't need to know everything, and Kat wasn't the type of girl to share. No. She didn't need any goddamn sympathy, any goddamn concern, not from Lilly Rush. Lilly was the one who'd needed sympathy, the one who'd needed to get things off her chest. Lilly was the one whose issues had seared through them both, who had needed to share her emotions. Kat was the listener, the shoulder, the girl with the cocktail glass who made things better. Maybe she'd had issues that had sparked the night, caused it to happen, but it had been for Lilly's benefit. Lilly had needed someone to hear her out, to listen to her troubles without judgement, with understanding, with the kind of empathy that only came from being the only other damn woman in Homicide. Lilly had been the one in need, that was just the way it was. It had to be that way. It had to be, 'cause that was what she'd told herself, and she had to cling to it. She couldn't be the one with issues. She couldn't.

Lilly was looking at her now, frowning, and Kat could see the pained discomfort once again flowing through her eyes as it had done when she'd realised that her confessions of the previous night hadn't been forgotten in the throes of Kat's hangover. Lilly had made her confessions, had bared herself… and, sure, Kat had been legless at the time, but she'd been there to hear them. Lilly had taken that step, whatever circumstances had brought it into being, and had laid bare her thoughts and emotions into the hands of another human being. The same person, Kat realised, as stood here now, refusing her the simple kindness of the same in return.

Once again, her mind flooded with flashes of memory, but this time they weren't of Lilly. Scotty Valens, grinning like an idiot, stood before her and reminded her in a voice that rang out so clear and loud it was deafening, that she'd be answering to him if she screwed up. That, whatever the hell had happened the previous night – and he hadn't even _known_ about the damn confession – had lit Lilly up like a damn Christmas Tree, that it was Kat's duty to keep that light there, to sustain whatever reprieve Lilly had found in her companionship. And he was right. Damn bastard Valens was right, and the thought made her blood boil in shame and anger. Lilly _was_ the one in need, and Kat was the one who was trying so damn hard to offer her what she needed – a _friend_. An honest-to-god friend, the kind that the boys (even Valens) could never be, because they were _boys_ and – hard as they tried on some occasions, and hard as they didn't on others – there were some things that they just couldn't empathise with. Lilly needed that kind of friendship. She'd been in a man's world long enough with nobody to guard her back against the tidal wave of testosterone, and Kat… well, as much as Lilly needed that offering, Kat needed to be the one to offer it. She wouldn't be able to live with herself if she didn't.

But friendship wasn't one-sided, and neither was Lilly Rush. It wasn't enough to offer that shoulder, to give that support… she had to be willing to take it as well. Lilly was smart, but she was also proud. She'd never accept a relationship – _any_ kind of relationship – wherein she was the only one surrendering herself. Trust was something that came hard to her at the best of times, Kat knew, and the very worst way to go about gaining that was to take all that she had to offer, and not give anything back. As desperately as Lilly had needed to be the one to break down last night, she needed something else now. She needed to know that she wasn't the only one who did that. And, in its own way, that was just as precious a gift as their conversation previous night had been. Perhaps, even more so.

"Y'know what?" she heard herself murmuring. "No. I ain't okay."

Lilly sighed, the gentle sound of someone who was simultaneously saddened by the admission and grateful for its existence. "Is this because of last night?" she asked quietly. "Because I said I hated my mother?" She exhaled, and leaned forward, eyes glowing brightly. "'Cause, god, Miller… there's no way in hell she hates you. Only need to look at her to know that. She _worships_ you."

"It's not…" Kat started, but cut herself off as the weight of what Lilly had just said landed on her. "Wait. Really? You got 'worship' from that? 'Cause, damn, Lil… even _you_ ain't that good a detective." Lilly chuckled smartly, and opened her mouth to push the issue, but Kat shook her head. "It's not that, anyway. It's…" Her head ached, her field of vision flooding with scattered fragments of recollection. Vera, laughing it up over Mike Delaney, his comments driving into her like daggers. Lilly, quietly furious, words of hatred and anger towards her mother pouring from her almost without her knowledge of them. Scotty, reminding her in no uncertain terms just how enormous a responsibility the burden of Lilly's trust was. Veronica, angry and petulant, filled with a hatred that would dissipate just as fast as it had appeared, but which hurt like hell anyway. The influx almost overwhelmed her, and she needed to gulp down a big lungful of air before she could continue. "It's _everything_, Lil."

The words had left her mouth before she'd even realised she'd been thinking them, so far beyond any control she could exert over them that there was nothing she could do but sit back and ride them out. Because she'd said them, and she'd said them to _Lilly_, who was staring at her, mouth half-open in confusion and anxiety… and she didn't want to say any more, but she could no more close the floodgates once they'd opened than Lilly could have done the previous night when it had been her turn.

"Everything?" Lilly asked; her voice was low, non-judgemental, but filled with the mild cynicism of someone who had heard an exaggeration and had every intention of calling the guilty party on it. "Lemme guess…" She crossed her arms, a touch of sadness creeping into that cynicism. "You're worried, if she keeps saying it, one day she's going to mean it. Like, _really_ mean it. You're scared that, when it's her turn to be looking back on her life, she'll look back and see you like…" She stumbled for a moment, and Kat watched with a grimace as her eyes snapped closed and her features twisted. "…like I see _my_ mother."

Kat blinked. Apparently, Lilly Rush really _was_ that good a detective. It wasn't the whole story, of course, but it was enough that she couldn't help being impressed by the blonde's insight. Thing was, she wanted – so desperately – to _let_ that be the whole story, to leave it there and let Lilly believe she was the greatest damn detective on the planet. But she'd promised herself to bare her soul to this woman in the same way that Lilly had done to her the previous night, and there was no going back now.

"Ain't just that, Lil," she whispered. "I'm not… I ain't worried she's gonna hate me." And this time, her eyes were the ones sliding closed, and she felt the muscles of her shoulders tighten until she could barely move at all. "I'm scared of givin' her a _reason_ to hate me. Like… like your mom gave you."

The sadness and cynicism on Lilly's face melted away like sugar in the rain, replaced by a pain so deep-set that Kat couldn't even begin to conceive of it. She took a step forward and, for a single second, Kat could've sworn she was going to hug her. It didn't happen, of course (the thought of Lilly Rush hugging anyone unprovoked was ludicrous, and she laughed at herself for even entertaining the thought), and Lilly instead broke away and moved to the coffee-maker sitting quietly on the counter. She didn't say anything for a long time, watching the machine percolate quietly, and frowning to herself, before finally biting her lip and turning back to face her companion. "Why in the hell would you think that?" she asked, soft and unassuming. "I've been here five minutes, and even I can see you're not a bad mother. You _care_, Miller. That means a hell of a lot." The words were spoken with resolve, but without an accusation or judgement; they'd both taken enough confessions to know when it wouldn't help to push that way. "What in the world could make you think you'd give her a reason to hate you?"

Kat stared at the floor with dizzying fury.

"My god…" Lilly sputtered, catching the hint that Kat was almost positive she hadn't thrown. "It was _Vera_, wasn't it?"

Kat flinched, and raised her head a little too sharply. "Don't," she said, but the word wasn't even audible to her own ears. It certainly wasn't loud enough to dissuade Lilly, who continued to bore right through her with those lethal ice-cold eyes of hers, and Kat was helpless to do anything other than sigh and give up her prayers of retaining any last semblance of elusiveness. "Him and that goddamn bastard Delaney…" she whispered, at long last, and went back to glaring at the floor. "Guys like Vera, Lil… guys like him… too busy worryin' about what Delaney did to _his_ goddamn reputation. Don't even stop to think about the victims. Won't even waste his goddamn testosterone thinkin' about how they feel, 'cause it's all about not makin' _him_ look bad when he does the same thing." She blinked back a surge of fury, feeling her thoughts crackling with more emotions than she could count. "He said it himself," she growled. "Girl says 'no', just means she's playin' hard-to-get. And that's him. That ain't '82, Lil. It's _now_." Her throat closed around the last word, and she had to work real hard to push it out. "Long as guys like _him_ are roamin' the streets, keepin' their damn eyes closed, guys like Delaney'll get away with it… And they'll keep getting away with it, forever."

Her vision was clouded, and she couldn't see, but she felt a sudden rush of heat in her fingers as Lilly pressed a steaming cup of coffee into her hands, her own wrapped around them for just as long as it took to make sure Kat wasn't likely to drop it. "I get that," she said, so softly that Kat almost missed it. "But what does it have to do with—"

"Everything!" Kat exploded. She pulled her head up once again, and fixed Lilly with a gaze so intense that she knew she'd never be able to sustain it. Allowing the weight of the word to sink in, allowing the heat and the power behind her eyes to pierce into Lilly's soul just as Lilly's had pierced into her own not so long ago, she took a deep breath and held it, before finally summoning the resolve to continue. "Worst thing in the whole world," she whispered, "is needing someone to protect you… _needing_ it, Lil, like you ain't never need anythin' in your life… and knowin' that it ain't gonna happen." Hard as she worked to prevent it, her eyes tore themselves from Lilly's and she turned away. "Knowin' that… however bad you need it… however goddamn _scared_ you are…" She felt her voice wavering, and struggled to find strength enough to finish, feeling herself begin to shake under the weight of it "…nobody's coming."

It wasn't until she felt Lilly's hands on her shoulders, solid but yielding as the blonde guided her to a chair, that she realised she couldn't breathe. She felt herself sit, felt Lilly's hands lingering on her shoulders, felt the slight pressure of contact as the other woman crouched in front of her, intense, struggling to meet her gaze once again even as Kat made a point of looking everywhere else except at her.

"I know," Lilly said, with a sincerity that – if Kat had anything in her lungs – would have stolen her breath. "I _know_."

"No, you don't," Kat heard herself answer, and felt the tightness of anger increase the weight of Lilly's hands on her shoulders. "You… you know… what the world's capable of, right? First-hand, second-hand, don't even matter… point is, you get that part." She imagined the tears fighting their way to Lilly's eyes, and hoped that would be enough to keep the blonde from trying to meet hers, if only for a moment. "But you don't… you don't know what it's like… to know that, to know the darkest things in the whole damn world, and know it ain't never, ever gonna change—" she paused, gasping "—and then have to raise a _child _in it."

She didn't need to look at Lilly to know that she was speechless; she could feel it in the sudden sharpness of the blonde's fingers digging into the skin on her shoulders, sensed it in the sudden distance – not literal, but figurative and just as telling – between them, knew it from the sudden hitching of the other woman's breath as she tried to absorb it all. To all that, and a million other insignificant telltale signs, she clung more tightly than she'd ever clung to anything in all her life. Lilly didn't have to say anything, didn't have to understand entirely… but she was _there_. Just as Kat herself had been there the previous night to hear the words that she was sure Lilly had never spoken to anyone, so their roles were reversed now, and Lilly was here listening, _hearing_ the words that Kat hadn't ever seen herself speaking. They came as new and unexpectedly to she herself as they did to Lilly, and yet the simple act of speaking them soothed her reeling mind like a cold balm.

"Damn universe can do whatever the hell it wants to me," she went on, her breath a little less laboured now. "I don't care. I really, _really_ don't care. I'm a cop. I don't wanna go through hell, I'm in the wrong job. We both know that." A wry smile fought its way, kicking and screaming, to her lips, for just a fractured moment. "But, if it tries to go after my daughter… and if I ain't there to stop it happening…"

Here, Lilly recovered her voice. "Stop what happening?"

Kat felt herself start to choke, a single gasping sob forcing its way past her defences, and she let it go. "_Anything._"

Lilly recoiled at that, and it took an almost tangible force of will for her not to back away entirely. Instead, she let her hands drift upwards from Kat's shoulders, holding her face and forcing their eyes to meet. "Listen to me," she said, in the voice of someone trying to explain an algebraic equation to a sufferer of Alzheimer's. "Listen. You can't protect her from _everything_, and you can't protect her _forever_. Nobody would expect that of you." Kat tried to shake her head, but Lilly held her in place. "No. You can't. You _can't_. It's not a question, Miller. It's not a discussion. It's a fact. We both know what this world is about… we both know the dangers of being a young girl in it… and, God knows, it can be worse than Hell." Her eyes clouded over at that, and her grip loosened ever so slightly. "But you can't be everywhere at the same time. You _just can't do it_, Kat."

"She's part of me, Lil," Kat heard herself pleading. "When she hurts, I hurt. She got the goddamn chicken-pox, I was itchin' for a week." Her fingers tightened around the coffee cup, so hard it was a miracle that it didn't shatter. "If anything ever happened to her, _anything_… it'd kill me."

"Yeah, it would," Lilly agreed, face unreadable. "And _that_ is the goddamn difference." There was a darkness brewing in her eyes now, a powerful storm-cloud of sympathy and fury and sorrow and fear, and Kat fought the urge to seek shelter from it. "Anything happens to Veronica… you'd hunt down whoever did it, and you'd break their damn neck, right?" Finally, she released her hold on Kat's face, and sat back on her heels. "Anything happened to me… anything happened to Chris… you know what my mom did?" It was a rhetorical question, but Kat shook her head in wordless surrender. "Nothing. And you know why?" Again, Kat shook her head, but this time Lilly shook hers too. "Because she didn't _care_. You got any idea what _that's_ like, huh?"

"No," Kat sighed softly. "I don't. I'm sorry, Lil."

"Of course you don't," Lilly replied, unfaltering. "No-one should have to." She stood up, and Kat watched her gently take the forgotten cup of now-cold coffee from her hands. "Point is… nobody expects you to protect Veronica all her life, from every tiny little thing that might or might not happen to her. It's not the ability to protect her that'll stop her hating you. It's the fact that you _want_ to."

And now, Kat stood up too, unable to tear her gaze from Lilly's as a spectrum of pain and bitter hatred soared and seared through her like an effulgent rainbow. Her eyes shifted, darkening one moment and softening the next, then glowing so bright that Kat had to fight the urge to shield her eyes from them. She wanted to say something, wanted to offer her own consolations (and some insignificantly small part of her realised that, once again, the conversation had shifted and Lilly was once more the one offering up information while Kat played the sympathetic shoulder), but the words wouldn't come. She was exhausted, drained dry by her own emotions and by those now playing across every last line of Lilly's face. A hundred thousand words swam through her mind, each more elaborate than the last, and yet none would pass her lips, and all she could do was take the coffee cup back and pour the untouched drink into the sink. Her soul screamed at her to do or say something, but she couldn't… and, as she placed the emptied cup back on the counter and turned her attention back to her companion, she could see in the swirling vortex of her eyes that 'nothing' was exactly the right thing to say at that moment.

Lilly inhaled deeply, almost thoughtfully; she was visibly preparing herself to say something that – if Kat was reading her right – she hadn't quite figured out what it was. She looked sad, and it was a sorrow that ran true and bone-deep and cut through Kat too as she watched, coupling with her own lingering pain and twisting around it so tightly that it was suddenly impossible to tell whose suffering was whose anymore. That was how it should have been, Kat realised. It wasn't enough that Lilly had shared her pain the previous night and it wasn't enough that Kat too had shared hers. They had to share each other's.

"Y'know," Lilly started, eventually, and there was a depth of contemplation and courage within the dregs of her voice. A tragically soft-edged smile touched her features, and she continued with understated grief, "I think I have an idea that could help us both."

* * *

**TBC**


	5. Before The Amplifiers

_A/N: As per usual, many thanks to everyone who took the time to review… and I really should apologise for taking so long to get this one up – being struck down by some RL unpleasantness, and having to re-write an awful lot of this chapter a half-dozen times resulted in… well, a pretty long delay. But, hey, it's here now. Enjoy!_

--

**5.  
Before The Amplifiers**

* * *

Had the situation not been so serious, Lilly would have laughed at the look on Miller's face as she took a hesitant – almost fearful – step backwards. There was such a depthless myriad of emotions flickering through her opaline eyes, supported by an explosion of innumerable facial expressions struggling for dominance over her features, it was nothing short of comedic. Not that Lilly could blame her, of course. Lilly Rush wasn't exactly the 'sharing' type at the best of times, and they both knew that her revelations the previous night had come solely in assumption that Miller would be too far gone to remember it. But, that barrier being broken through, and Kat having reciprocated it by a confessional of her own just a few scant minutes ago… there was no going back.

Somewhere between Lilly's own admissions the previous night and Kat's right now, something had changed. The game – if it could be called a game, though Lilly certainly couldn't think of a more accurate way of describing it – had shifted somehow, had ceased being two cops trying to second-guess each others' underlying issues, and become a kind of connection. Suddenly, the presumptions had been cast off like winter coats, and replaced by compassion and empathy… and, though Lilly would deny it to her grave, _trust_.

She'd seen the trust in Miller's eyes as she'd allowed herself the haven of her confession; it had been raw and pure and true, and it had affected Lilly on a level almost deeper than the words the other woman had been speaking. She knew that Miller had been having issues with Vera's insensitivity; she'd seen that as clear as daylight. But she'd had no idea how deeply those issues cut, how profoundly they'd affected the other woman, until Kat had lowered her defences and granted Lilly the privilege of learning those details. It had been more than an admission of her own emotional shortcomings, Lilly knew. It had been an acceptance, an expression of genuine gratitude for what Lilly had entrusted to _her_ care the previous night. It had been an offering, almost, stating by implication that Kat was willing to bare her soul entirely, if that was what it would take for Lilly to do the same.

That was new. It was rare and it was precious, and it was all these things a thousand times more powerfully given the nature of their job. Nobody in Homicide would willingly open themselves up to any of the others. They spent so much of their lives surrounded by suspects who lied, witnesses who twisted the truth, and victims who were caught up in webs of deceit, sometimes it was impossible to tell the facts from the fictions even within their own minds. It wasn't anything personal, Lilly knew, it was simply the way they all were… the way they had to be if they wanted any hope of surviving within the twisted labyrinth of Homicide.

It was easy, she mused, for everyone to look at her and see Lilly Rush the Ice Queen. But they were all the same; she'd seen it time and time again. Even Nick Vera, the closest approximation they had to an open book, had denied any existence of his marital problems until the day he couldn't hide from it any more. It hadn't taken much for the rest of them to guess (Vera's talent for keeping secrets was about as sharp as his talent for tact) but the simple fact was, he'd denied the situation as if his very life had depended on it, whether for the sake of his reputation or that of his sanity, it really didn't matter. And he certainly wasn't alone. None of them had ever really 'opened up'. That was simply the way things sat between them all. They were a well-oiled machine, and they flattered themselves that they all knew each other so well, there was no need for spoken words or confrontations between them. On those blissfully rare occasions where something happened that _did_ require talking about, Lilly had found, it always seemed to come with a really uncomfortable sense of awkwardness on the part of all involved.

Lilly herself most certainly wasn't a great trend-setter when it came to being open and honest about her issues, and so this was a frightening kind of new territory for her. Oh, she'd been forced to face her concerns before, most often when confronted by Scotty about them; he'd been the one who'd chased her down over the Joseph Shaw case (and the mere thought of that was enough to send a shameful blush cascading across her face, which she sorely hoped beyond all hope that Miller wouldn't pick up on), and he'd been the one to approach her when all _this_ had begun, just after her mother had died. If she'd ever been inspired to open up of her own accord, she'd always assumed it would be to him, because he'd always been the one to bring that out in her, that desire to be honest if only for a brief moment, and if only in a partial sense. He was her partner, and – even if she'd never said a word about any of the things they'd discussed over the course of their partnership – still, he knew her better than anyone else on the team. It would've been logical, if not entirely welcome to her self-awareness, if he'd been the one that she'd ended up spilling her very soul to. It would have been… expected.

This, on the other hand? This hadn't even been on the radar. Scotty, like Lilly, was closed and elusive and preferred the route of denial to that of admission. He had an image, a reputation, and he sure as hell wasn't about to throw that away by talking about his feelings. And, for a long while, Lilly had assumed that Kat Miller was exactly the same way. For a year or more after she'd joined the team, she'd made a point of refusing to volunteer even the most basic of information about herself, right down to the fact that she had a daughter.

In all the time Lilly had known her, Miller had opened herself up exactly _once_… and that had been more than a year ago. Lilly had found her 'moping' (as Scotty, ever the compassionate wordsmith, had so eloquently put it) over the unsolved murder of Skill Jones, and had listened with quiet understanding as the other woman had spilled over like a dam bursting, reliving her moments with the boy before his death, looking up at her with eyes so wide that it had taken Lilly completely by surprise. There had been a vulnerability in Miller then, the likes of which she had never seen, and had always believed she'd never see again. It had been subtle, controlled, almost self-conscious, but it had been there, unmistakeable… and, most shocking of all, it had been right there on display, bright and wild. She'd been haunted (in every sense of the word) by the boy's death, and hadn't been ashamed to let Lilly see that in her face. It had been the first time since they'd begun working together that Lilly had seen depths within the woman that ran beyond her façade of loudmouthed attitude, and there had been no denying the quiet pulse of camaraderie and empathy that had coursed through her at the sight. She'd had Kat's back then, had helped her convince the boss that Skill's was a case worth re-opening, and (though neither of them would ever cross the line quite so much as to actually discuss it later) Miller's gratitude had been tangible.

That had been about business, though, and it had been easy for Lilly – if not quite so simple for Kat – to hide behind work-related professionalism. Of course Miller had been shaken by the memory, but the look on her face that day had told Lilly that she would've spilled herself to anyone who'd asked. Well, perhaps not Nick Vera… but Scotty or Will, certainly. It had been a coincidence, they'd both assumed, that Lilly had been the only one concerned enough to follow up Kat's uncharacteristic reclusiveness with actual concern. But, of course, that hadn't been a coincidence at all, had it? Because the brief flare of compassion that had prompted Lilly to check up on Miller in the first place, even that had been sparked by precisely that 'female solidarity' that Nick Vera, even now, took so damn lightly. And, like now, he'd been the one to prompt it, sparking her feminist pride by insisting that Miller had just been a victim to '_that female cycle thing'_. Of course Lilly would take the other woman's side in the face of that, and of course she'd then take it upon herself to show her rarely-used compassionate side. It was the least she could've done in the wake of such chauvinism. Nothing brought women together, she mused with a hint of irony, quite like ignorance from the males. And, if ever there was an ignorant male, it was Nick.

"Earth to Lilly Rush…"

The sound of her name caused Lilly to shake herself out of her puzzled reverie, her gaze shifting back to where it belonged. Miller was still staring at her, but she'd retreated to the other end of the kitchen. One hand rested on her hip in what Lilly recognised as her most penetrating non-nonsense posture, while the other tapped on the counter with combined unease and impatience. She was frowning, but it was a frown borne more of confusion than anything else, as if she was desperately trying to figure out what she was supposed to expect here, but the simple fact was that this was an unprecedented moment and she was completely at sea. Lilly Rush didn't have 'ideas' (at least not ones that were unrelated to work). It simply did not happen.

"Sorry," she said, not sounding the least bit apologetic. Miller tried to take another step backwards, but the counter obstructed the effort and she winced as her back connected with the sharp edge. Lilly shook her head. "You don't need to look so scared," she said, sounding almost offended.

The comment was light, and the discomfiture dropped from Kat's face like a discarded veil. "I don't get _scared_," she retorted, a little defensive but also just a little self-mocking. "Besides… even if I _did_, I sure as hell wouldn't be scared by some skinny blonde, whatever the hell _idea_ she's packin'."

"Good," Lilly replied, simple and stern, and she let that word hang over Miller's head like a guillotine blade. "Because you're the one who started all this, not me." Miller recoiled at that, reacting as if the words had been a switchblade tearing through her, and Lilly felt her heart soften, though her voice didn't. "You made this happen, you brought us to this point. You and your damn alcohol… I was doing just fine until you came along and made me—" She broke off.

"—made you realise you weren't doing just fine?" Kat asked.

She grinned, sheepish and charismatic, as Lilly shot her a dangerous glare. She wasn't right, not exactly, but that didn't stop the irritation from rising in Lilly at the knowledge that she was still hitting far closer to home than she was comfortable with. "Not exactly," she admitted, before she could stop herself. "But you… made me realise that maybe it's not…" Again, she trailed off, and this time when her eyes met Kat's, it was in the hope that she would finish the sentence, as opposed to her former hope that she wouldn't.

"…that maybe it ain't the end of the world if you let people _see_ that you ain't doin' just fine?" Miller offered, gently, and suddenly she was the one breaking eye-contact again to stare fixedly at the floor, while Lilly was the one suddenly struggling to retain that connection for just a few moments longer. "It ain't the end of the world, Lil… but, God knows, I get that it feels like it is." She exhaled, clearly fighting some kind of struggle with herself, before tightening her jaw and continued, still not looking up. "You know why I kept seein' the damn shrink after I got shot?"

Lilly shook her head, but she could tell just by looking at the resolve that clenched every muscle in Kat's body as she took a breath, that she quite probably didn't _want_ to know.

"Because, if I hadn't," Kat went on, toneless and numb, "it would've torn me apart." Lilly raised an eyebrow at that, but didn't interrupt. "You know what it's like after goin' through something like that, and not talkin' about it. It never goes away, however much you want it to, however much you _pray_ it will. It doesn't. You re-live it, over and over, 'till it drives you crazy. But you… you're okay. You get your nightmares. Don't make like you don't, 'cause I know you do. And you wake up screamin' – _screamin'_ – but it don't matter, 'cause there ain't no-one there to hear you, and you can pretend like it never happened, right? 'Cause _you_ ain't wakin' up to see your little girl sittin' on the edge of the bed, scared to death 'cause she ain't never heard a sound like that before. And it's loud, and it's filled with pain and fear and all those emotions that a kid shouldn't ever have to witness… and it's comin' from the one person in all the world that's supposed to be invincible."

So, that was it. Lilly didn't waste time on sympathies, knowing that there was little point in such, instead opting for understanding – a much rarer, and much more valuable sentiment – and nodded. "You kept seeing the shrink 'cause it was the better option for a total stranger to hear you screaming, than your own daughter?" she asked. "All right."

"_No_, Lil," Miller replied, sounding almost angry. "I kept seein' the shrink 'cause I realised that sometimes _openin' up to someone_ is better than keepin' it all bottled inside." Finally, she did raise her head, and when she met Lilly's eyes her own were so dark they seemed to suck all the light from the room. "Can't hide from your demons forever, Lil, nobody can. They always come out in the end… and you gotta make sure you're the one callin' the shots, not them."

Lilly smiled at that, with a genuine warmth that surprised her. "Good," she said for the second time, her resolve strengthened by Miller's words and her own thoughts. "'Cause you're going to help me with that. You're the one who started this, you're the one who's talking about facing your demons and dealing with your problems. You're the one making me realise that it's not the end of the world to open up… and I never asked for any of it, so you're sure as hell going to take responsibility. Okay?"

Kat's eyes brightened, almost glittering with emotions that Lilly couldn't quite place, and she perched herself atop the counter with a quick salute. "Okay," she said. "Whatever you say, Detective Rush." The use of Lilly's title, in sharp contrast to her habitual use of her first name, struck a chord of gentle humour yet absolute seriousness, and Lilly found the warmth in her smile cool into something more sombre but no less genuine. "So," Kat went on, smooth and efficient and deeply hopeful, "you gonna share your 'idea'?"

Lilly nodded. "Yeah, I am," she said, and used the words as a brace against which to support herself as she prepared for the truly hard part… the part where she really would be opening up and surrendering herself to the compassion of this woman. "You want me to face my demons? Okay. I'll do that…" She waited, watching Miller's reaction, and feeling herself glowing as Kat beamed with the same delirious joy as she had the previous night under the influence of one cocktail too many. "…but you're going to come, too."

The joy on Kat's face, that incomparable flush of utter jubilation at having once again been the one who'd convinced the immoveable Lilly Rush to confront her inner issues, sharpened at the edges, shifting into something more playful. She smirked, almost predatory, and it was clear from the iridescence that shone from her now – almost blinding in its intensity – that she was already placing her bets on Lilly's idea being alcohol-related. "So… where are we going?"

Almost unconsciously, the smile on Lilly's own face dissolved like sugar, in favour of the inundating seriousness that now flooded her completely and threatened to drown them both beneath the near-solid weight of it. It was a stark contrast to Kat's mischievous glee, the almost arrogant assumption that she was the indestructible bringer of clarity and closure, and Lilly took a deep breath – to prepare them both for what was to come – before continuing. "We're going to see my mother," she answered.

The smirk dropping from her face, Kat fell off the counter.

* * *

Surprisingly, it didn't take very long for Lilly to convince Miller that it was a good idea. Once she'd righted herself, and stopped complaining about how frequently she seemed to be falling off things when Lilly was around, there had been a sense of almost resignation in the other woman's eyes as she'd nodded her consent. As if, had Miller been of sound enough mind to stop and think about the nature of their discussion, she would've figured out where the conversation would end before even Lilly herself had done. And maybe that was just another edge to Kat's innate intuition… but maybe (and the thought caused tides of simultaneous frustration and relief to flow through her in opposing directions) Lilly Rush really was _that_ predictable.

Problem was, there was a huge difference between making a pact to do something, and actually taking that ever-important step and _doing_ it. It had been easy for Lilly to throw out the idea, in the heat of the emotionally-charged moment that had preceded her suggestion, and it had been easy for Kat – drained and dazed as she had been from her confessions and no doubt the fall as well – to agree to it. But to have an idea agreed upon was one thing. To actually act on that agreement? That was a world apart.

Two days later, they stood there; the two of them, outside the gates of the cemetery. Trapped, almost, between the world from which they'd come and that into which they were about to descend. Behind them, the world of the living, from whence they'd ventured and to which they'd eventually return; ahead, the world of the dead, beseeching them to join them, to walk among them, if only for a little while. At that moment, they belonged to neither world, unable to retreat and yet unable to find the courage within themselves or within each other to propel them that vital step forward. And so, they stood. Together, utterly isolated.

"So… we gonna stand here all day?"

Lilly felt herself start, blinking in poorly-concealed surprise as she turned to face the question. Kat was studying her, eyes wide with… was that real fear?

In all the time they'd been working together (and in spite of Lilly's half-mocking assertion during that conversation in the other woman's kitchen), Lilly had only ever seen Kat Miller look truly scared once. They'd been looking into the death of a longshoreman, and their investigations had led them to a holding-house for underage illegal immigrants being trafficked as prostitutes; Lilly and Kat had been on the scene to hunt down information from the girls and, as they'd made to enter the house, Miller had turned to Lilly and – for the first and only time since they'd known each other – had admitted that she hadn't wanted to go in. She hadn't used the word 'scared', had simply said that she hadn't wanted to see what was waiting inside the house… but that had been more weakness than she'd ever admitted to before, and Lilly had seen the fear in her eyes, the unspoken horror, and she'd felt her heart melt a little.

They'd made it as far as the main hallway of the house, together, and then Lilly had continued on her own. That, they both knew, had been a wholly different situation to this one, but the look in Miller's eyes right now was exactly the same as it had been then. Fearful. Genuinely _scared_.

The problem was, Lilly realised… this time, she knew, when Kat looked at her with that wide-eyed terror plain as day across her face, she was looking right back at her with the same expression reflected a hundredfold. Yeah, she was scared too, this time. Terrified. It had been her idea, and deep down inside she knew it was something that she had to do, just as she had to keep breathing and just as she had to keep doing her job or risk withering away into dust and nothingness. She needed to be hear, needed to face the demon that had been haunting her for her entire life. Needed to look down at the remains of the one person who'd held her captive so completely for longer than she could remember. Needed to _see_ her mother, to see the earth under which she rested – if Ellen Rush were even capable of rest, even in death – to look upon her and feel herself set free. She needed to do this, it was true, but that didn't stop her being frightened now that it was here.

"I guess we are," she said, in answer to Miller's question.

Kat exhaled, chewing thoughtfully on her bottom lip. "Okay," she replied, after a moment's contemplation. "So we stand here all day. We don't gotta do this right now." Her eyes flashed, bright and intense, and Lilly felt herself recoil just a little. "If you ain't ready, that's okay. You wanna go home right now, I ain't gonna judge… and, if you really do gotta stand here all day just to figure all that out, that's okay too." She glanced down, and Lilly followed her gaze as Kat traced her fingertips along the edge of Lilly's hand, clearly wanting to offer some kind of tactile reassurance but hesitant to do so. "There ain't no time-limit on this thing, and I ain't goin' anywhere until you tell me to." Gradually, that hesitation began to dissipate, and she grasped Lilly's hand in her own, squeezing tight. "However long it takes."

Reflexively, Lilly felt herself flinch. She pulled her hand free – jerking it, almost – and took a step back almost before she was aware of having done it, and long before she became aware of the wounded look now colouring Kat's face.

She should've expected the touch, really. Miller was a tactile person at the best of times, she knew, always seeking out some kind of tangible point of contact in any situation, from resting a hand on a witness's shoulder, to clinging to Veronica. The scant handful of times Lilly had caught sight of the other woman with her daughter, she was always holding fast to the little girl's hand, as if the loss of that physical touch would be the loss of the child. So many things were reflected by such a simple thing as touch – love, compassion, protection, reassurance, sympathy, and countless others. Lilly couldn't help thinking that her quickness to break away said as much about her own fractured mindset, as Kat's desperation in seeking it out had said about hers.

Touch wasn't something Lilly had been raised to appreciate, at least not from the women in her family. To her, for as long as she could remember, touch was something that was to be shared with the men in her life, a closely-guarded prize that one had to earn in order to be rewarded by. It had been the same for Chris, clearly, who gave it up like cheap wine… but moments of contact between herself and Lilly, moments of intimacy between the two sisters? That was an alien concept. Worse than alien, it was practically outlawed. They were Rush girls; they didn't need comfort, not from anyone, and sure as hell not from each other. The simplicity of a hug, the quiet reassurance offered by the pressure of one hand on another, just to say '_I'm here, you're not alone'_… who in the hell needed that? Not the Rush girls, that was for damn sure. They were stronger than that, tougher. Growing up the way they did, they had to be.

It must've been different for Kat. Whether that 'different' necessarily meant 'better', Lilly couldn't say (she had her suspicions, but experience had taught her never to be so presumptuous as to mistake suspicion for fact), but that it was different was certain. For Lilly, touch was something sacred, reserved for lovers and those who had earned that depth of trust. It wasn't something to be given away freely, or else she'd end up like Christina. For Kat, on the other hand, touch was something to be shared with everyone, wherever possible, a gift that she felt it was her duty to give. A way of expressing herself, maybe, on a level that even the eloquence of her words couldn't reach. It didn't mean anything, but at the same time, it meant everything.

Lilly drew in a deep breath, and held it. The moment of contact, startling as it had been, was also a stark reminder of all the things Ellen Rush was responsible for, and tempered rage flooded in to fill the space that now gaped like a chasm between herself and Kat. Ellen, who'd been so busy drinking or getting busy with innumerable inappropriate men to ever give her children a goodnight hug. Who had been the reason that Lilly's childhood had been spent, not playing jump-rope with the other kids, but scrounging for leftover scraps of food. Who had screwed up Lilly's life before Lilly had even been aware of the fact that the life was hers to live in the first place, who had taken every last fragment of innocence and youth from Lilly and from Christina, and turned them into urchins. Who was the reason now that Lilly had shoved that chasm of space between herself and the woman who was reaching out and trying so hard to be a friend, simply because the notion of a woman offering another her hand in support and comfort was so alien and unknown to her that she had impulsively freaked out.

Her mother's soul had been filled with darkness, Lilly knew. Black and cold, like the revenants of a fire, days after it had ripped through everything in its path, when nothing remained but ash and coal. Anything that had once been pure and good and true within the heart of Ellen Rush had been corroded away by the acid of too many generations of booze and bad men. And yet, at the end… right at the end, when Lilly had been willing herself – truly willing it, with every fibre of discipline she had – to _hate_ the woman, to turn away and watch her go with eyes so poisoned against her that they could see nothing but that blackness within and without… only then had Ellen allowed herself to remember the precious moments. So few and so rare, and yet so irremovably grafted onto Lilly's consciousness, onto her very soul, that she could no more forget them than she could forget the frozen nights of starving to death because their last cent had gone on half a bottle of vodka.

She _did_ hate her mother; she hadn't been lying when she'd said that. But, for all the truth in that, and all the deep-set loathing that simply couldn't be undone through a few timely shared memories… for all her self-inflicted denial and for all her refusal to acknowledge it… yeah, she loved her, too. Even right at the end, with the knowledge that she would never again be forced to worry about the one person in all the world who didn't deserve her pity, the freedom that came with never having to be haunted by those hated demons again… even though she looked down with utter loathing at the woman who had destroyed her life and that of her sister, even so, she'd been unable able to deny or ignore the pain and the sorrow and the _love_ that had soared through her like a bird in flight, unfettered and untameable. And that was the hard part; reconciling the hatred with the love, both struggling for dominance over her, and neither willing to concede an inch, both insisting that they had equal right to be there, even as all the while Lilly's own fractured psyche insisted that she needed to step up and make the decision on her own. And it was that knowledge, that realisation that she _needed_ that reconciliation before she could do anything – even something so small as accept an innocuous moment of tactile contact from a friend – that propelled her at long last into motion.

"C'mon," she said, moving off and taking a long step towards the gate. She could feel the heat of Miller's eyes on her, and knew without glancing back that she still had that wounded look on her face, but she refrained from turning to catch the other woman's gaze. "We're doing this. Now."

Kat made no reply, but Lilly could hear the subtle sounds of motion swirling behind her, and knew that the other woman was following. It surprised her a little – and all the more in light of her prior reaction to Miller's bid at lending support – but she was grateful for that. The sound of movement, the knowledge that Kat was still there, that she would remain by her side as she'd said she would. It felt… comforting… to know that there was somebody there with her, though she'd never in a million years expected that – when this day arrived, and she was ready to look down at her mother's grave and see in stone and earth the fact of her death – it would be with Kat Miller standing beside her.

But, in an odd sort of way, Kat needed this too. The Delaney case, and Nick Vera's ill-spoken thoughts about it, had forced her to see within herself something that even now Lilly didn't fully understand, and to see a future for herself where _she_ was the one lying in the ground, wasted and wasting, while Veronica struggled to reconcile her hatred with that love that she would try so hard to deny ever existing. Just as Lilly needed to patch up her own fragmented emotions, Kat needed to patch up her own innate doubts.

There was a tragic sort of solace that came with entering a graveyard, and Lilly felt a broken sort of closure descend upon her before she even reached the first row of headstones. Perhaps it was the nature of her job, the knowledge so far beyond those of the average graveside visitor of exactly how deeply the stories behind those tombs went, but she couldn't deny the strange – almost sordid – empathy that bubbled up within as her eyes scoured the first row of names, absorbing them and filing them away. Any one of them might turn out to be a cold job, with some intriguing or fascinating life that she and the rest of Homicide would one day find themselves unravelling. In their line of work, it was the dead – not the living – with whom the stories lay.

"Lil."

Shaken from her reverie, Lilly turned. Kat stood about two-dozen feet away, hovering over a particular grave with crossed arms and hunched shoulders; at first glance, Lilly could almost believe the posture was an attempt to keep warm, but a second glance was more than enough to realise it wasn't. Miller's stance was a defensive one, as if she'd found a small creature and was protecting it from harm, and it was a stance that told her the other woman wasn't quite so enthralled by the stories that lay behind the gravestones. The discomfort emanated from every part of her as she stood there, looking more than a little ill at ease, and Lilly couldn't conceal the frown that forced its way to her features as she approached the grave and the woman.

"What's up?" she asked.

Miller tilted her head in the general direction of a particular grave. "Think I got her," she offered, then frowned, lips moving in a silent self-deprecating curse. "It. Her. I mean…"

Despite herself, Lilly chuckled at that. They were murder cops, the most well-equipped people in the world to deal with situations like this and to know exactly what to say, and yet – apparently – they were struck down by the same flashes of awkwardness and discomfort as anyone else, when it really came down to it. Kat certainly had the look of a nervous friends, the kind who'd never done this sort of thing before and who didn't have a clue what was the right and the wrong thing to say. She looked guilty, and Lilly had no doubt she'd be wearing the exact same look even if she'd said every worth with utter perfection. Because, as Lilly had said when pouring out her heart in the face of Kat's drunkenness, suddenly it was _different_. It wasn't just death now, it wasn't just row upon row of dead bodies and embalmed corpses. It was Lilly's mother, and suddenly all the rules and the tricks they'd picked up in Homicide, all the countless cadavers they'd encountered throughout their dual careers, and all the innumerable mourners who had passed through their doors… nothing could prepare either of them for this. Right then, they weren't cops, and they weren't murder detectives. They were just two people.

"Yeah," Lilly heard her own voice rejoin, without even looking at the headstone that had caught Kat's attention. She didn't need to look at it to know the answer. "Yeah. It's her."

"Yeah," Kat repeated, and her arms visibly tightened around herself. "You need a minute? I could go look around, hunt down some new cold jobs? Ain't no shortage of 'em round here, I'm guessin'." The feint at humour was weak at best, but Lilly appreciated it even so, and felt herself smiling.

"No," she said. "You just keep doing what you're doing, Kat."

Kat flinched visibly at that, eyes darkening fast with something Lilly couldn't quite place (for all her innate powers of detection), and she turned towards Lilly, moving her entire body as if her spine had lost all its flexibility. "That's just what—" she started, but cut herself off, with the guilt-ridden flush of someone who had caught themselves saying something they weren't supposed to. "That's… that's the second time this week, one of you jackasses has told me that," she said, at last, and Lilly felt her smile widen into a grin; it didn't take the greatest detective in Philadelphia to figure out who the other person had been, and a flood of warmth wrapped itself around her like a blanket as Scotty Valens smirked at her mind's eye for just one single moment.

"Well, then," she said, desperately hoping that her features wouldn't give any of that away, even as she saw Kat's eyes narrow suspiciously. "If everyone's telling you to do it…"

And, finally, Kat untangled herself from her tightly-crossed arms, spreading them wide in a universal gesture of utter defeat. "But I dunno what it _is_ that I'm doin'!" she exploded.

Lilly felt herself melt, then, and – without even thinking about it – she felt her hand reaching out, independent of her thoughts, to firmly grasp one of Miller's. She, who had pulled away scant minutes earlier, as if the mere thought of physical contact had been a hot potato, now wrapped her hand around Kat's, holding on so tight that it might as well have been a beating heart. Kat stumbled a little, eyes wide and confused, and Lilly felt her fingers curl into a fist beneath her own, tight and resolved, and she pulled the hand – and, with it, the whole arm – towards her, until Kat's body was almost flush against her own, their tangled arms trapped between them. And then, her mind still having no control over her, she pulled her arm free, just for a second, and enveloped the other woman in a gigantic bear-hug.

"You make me _smile_, you idiot," she whispered. "You make me angry and you make me confess things that you have no goddamn right asking about… and you make me hate myself for confessing it, and hate you for making me confess it… and then, before I'm even through hating either of us, you do or say something so goddamn _stupid_ and you just… you make me smile. And I thought I'd forgotten how to do that. I honestly thought I'd forgotten." She pulled back, fixing the woman with a gaze that she knew were filled with grateful tears, and again she cursed them both for it, and again Kat just looked so lost and so blindsided and so _confused_ that Lilly couldn't keep herself from smiling all over again. "You tear me apart, Miller," she continued, "and you sure as hell don't make me _happy_, not by any definition of the word. But, my god, you make me smile."

Kat was staring at her as if she'd been speaking Dutch. "I… you…" she said, in a very tiny voice. "You hugged me. That ain't _right_. You never hug anyone." Her eyes narrowed, a combination of anxiety and suspicion. "You an alien?"

"Yeah," Lilly said, letting her head drop ever so slightly until it rested against Miller's. "Yeah, let's go with that. I'm an alien. When I've finished saying goodbye to my mother, I'm going to take over the world… starting with Broadway."

Kat laughed, the vibration running all through Lilly's body as the other woman draped a supportive arm around her; this time, instead of pulling away, Lilly allowed herself to lean in, absorbing all the warmth and fondness and genuine compassion that was there to be taken, so much so that she could feel the smile on Kat's lips without even needing to turn her head and see it. "I like Alien Lilly," Miller said, eventually, and there was peace in her voice. "She's got a sense of humour. Regular Lilly could learn somethin' from her."

Had the gesture not involved moving, Lilly would've swatted her for that comment. As it was, she said nothing, instead allowing herself to drink in every drop that remained of the moment, relishing every last part of it and feeling the gratitude and solace course through her for a long precious moment before finally – _finally_ – turning her eyes in the one direction they'd been so desperately trying to avoid.

_Here Lies Ellen Rush._

Every muscle in Lilly's body tightened, and she felt Kat's arm tense slightly around her in reaction. She forced her eyes to focus on the words, to see them and nothing else, to drain the headstone dry of them. Her lips, moving almost against her will, formed the words, repeating them soundlessly like a silent mantra. _Here Lies Ellen Rush_. Her mother. Lilly's mother. Lilly Rush's mother. Ellen Rush. That was who lay here. Here, right here. Ellen Rush lay here, right underneath her daughter's feet. Ellen Rush, deceased.

The words repeated themselves, over and over. A million different ways, a million times, and yet the meaning was the same. Over and over again, she struggled to put those words together, to grasp the concept and the meaning like she grasped hold of evidence and forced it to reveal its secrets to her. There had to be some kind of secret here, some kind of lock into which she could place some mystery key and unravel all the secrets of this situation. Because it didn't make sense. It didn't make sense that Ellen was lying there, under the ground, that she was dead and her daughter was standing over her and not shedding any tears.

That was what daughters did, wasn't it? Wasn't that why she was here? To make peace with her mother, to shed her tears and cry over the loss of Ellen Rush? To reconcile her hatred with the love she still fought with all her strength to deny, and to finally mourn? From the moment she'd found out, her mind had been filled to overflowing with so many countless emotions that it had been impossible to keep straight. The hatred towards a woman who had taken away her childhood and her innocence as though, by giving her life, she somehow had the right to take it away as well. The love towards that pitiful, hopeless creature that had been living with her at the end… who, through the haze of alcohol and ignorance, still remembered those tiny details. The deluge of heartbreak and pain that had cascaded down upon her as her mind flooded with memories of _The Velveteen Rabbit_, both from her own childhood and Ellen's final weeks. It had been a highly fitting reversal of the mother-daughter roles both had played for so long, and Lilly hadn't even realised until it had been too late.

Ellen had never been a mother to Lilly, not really, but that book had always stood fixed in Lilly's mind, a beacon of significance. Those scant, precious, almost non-existent moments when her mother had held her close and read her favourite book and chased all the nightmares away. Then, and only then, Ellen Rush had truly been Lilly's mother. It had been only fitting, then, that – at the end – it was Lilly reading the book and Ellen whose nightmares were finally catching up with her. Right then, in those final days and weeks and moments – just as she'd always said she was throughout her life, doubled over with the weight of responsibility that came from living under an alcoholic's roof – at the end, finally and truly, Lilly had been a mother to Ellen, and Ellen had been the helpless mewling infant who'd taken comfort in a children's story. It had been… tragic.

She'd relived those memories at the time, and relived them again now, feeling as if for the first time the memories that accompanied them. They bubbled beneath the surface of who she was, scrabbling for attention and dominance over each other, fighting like cats or children. The hatred, the love, the heartbreak, the pain. Everything she'd ever felt towards her mother, and countless other things besides.

So why then was she dry-eyed, staring at the gravestone and trying to find some kind of oblique meaning within it? Why hadn't those tears started to fall? She wasn't holding them back, at least not so far as she was aware of it, and yet they simply weren't there. She was looking down, gazing upon the stone that marked the final resting place of her deceased mother, her mind and heart reeling with so many thoughts and feelings that it was impossible to tell one from another, let alone make any sense out of them… and yet, she wasn't crying. She'd come here to loose the weight that still hung over her shoulders and over her head, to reconcile her memories and her feelings about the woman who deserved neither her pity nor her time. She'd come here to shed those tears, to cry out her heart and make peace with the memory of her mother. So why was she standing here, dry-eyed? Why was she, even now, refusing herself the one final reprieve that she needed?

"Is it me?" she asked, only realising that the words had been uttered aloud when she felt the surprised jolt of motion as Kat pulled away from her. Lilly sighed; she was so used to spending her emotional moments alone, she needed to remember that thinking aloud wasn't a good idea when in the company of others. Still, meeting the sympathetic curiosity in Kat's eyes, she steeled herself, and continued. "Am I just that heartless?" she went on, trying to pretend that she'd forgotten the other woman was there… trying to believe that she was alone, just trying to muddle through her chaotic thoughts in whatever way forced them to make sense.

"Lil…" Kat started, but trailed off, arms spread helplessly.

Moving slowly, Lilly turned to face her, feeling her face tauten with intensity. "You were right," she said, quietly and simply, as if they were discussing crossword puzzles. "In the end… she was still my mom." The admission, and the realisation of the truth behind the words, brought with it a full-body tremor. "I hated her. I hated her so much… but I couldn't stop myself loving her. I wanted to… but I couldn't stop."

"I know," Kat murmured, shifting her weight from one foot to the other and back again, visibly unable to figure out whether she should be stepping forwards or backwards.

Lilly loosened her posture, feeling her shoulders slumping forwards and feeling – physically feeling – the light fade behind her eyes even before she saw the surprise in Miller's eyes reflect it. "Then why, Kat?" she heard herself ask, and suddenly everything she said and did, she was witnessing from a great distance, seeing herself move and hearing herself speak as if her mind was suddenly an entirely different person. "Why aren't I crying? She's my damn mother. She's my mother and she's _dead_, and I… I'm not crying." And now she was the one taking a step forward, her hands on Miller's shoulders in a mirror of their conversation in the other woman's kitchen, only this time Lilly was the one drawing strength from the contact and Kat was the one holding her upright. "You're the biggest smartass in Philly, Kat. You know everything. So tell me… why aren't I crying?"

"I don't know," Miller confessed, her own hands crossing to rest atop Lilly's where they sat. "I don't know why you're not crying. Some people don't need to cry to grieve. Maybe you're…" Her eyes darkened, and she lowered her head to keep them concealed. "Maybe you're one of the lucky ones." Moving slowly, she removed Lilly's hands from her shoulders, and turned her around so she was once again facing the grave. Lilly smiled sadly, leaning back until she felt Miller's arms encircle her completely, the other woman's front pressed loosely against her back. "Talk to her, Lil."

Lilly chuckled. "That's stupid."

"Yeah, it is." She could feel the warmth in Miller's voice, and let herself get lost in it. "But you dunno if it'll work 'till you try it…" Her body shifted, and Lilly felt her cheek brushing against her shoulder. "So how 'bout you humour me?"

Sighing, Lilly once again studied the gravestone. _Talk to her_. Easier said than done. She was a cop, rational and logical to a fault. She looked at dead bodies and saw corpses, looked at gravestones and saw simply the last resting place of the dead. Her mother was under there, she knew, but would it really do either of them any good for her to speak her piece now? To give voice to those angry words that had eaten her alive her entire existence? Lilly certainly didn't see how. Still, she felt the pressure of contact increase as Kat pulled her closer for a moment, inhaling, and then pulled away entirely; Lilly knew that she was backing away before she heard the telltale footsteps, and all of a sudden she was alone. Right where she didn't want to be. Alone, in a field full of dead bodies, looking down at the pointless chunk of rock that insisted _here_ lay the one person she didn't want to be here with. Alone with her mother.

Sad and angry at the same time, Lilly drew in a breath. "Hey, Mom."

* * *

**TBC**

_A/N: I'd originally intended this to be the last chapter of this thing… but, as always seems to be the way with these bloody chapter fics, it ran away with me. Here's hoping the next one is obedient enough that I still have some semblance of structure left by the end. ;-)_


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